Re: The problem
"boost performance by using more RAM?"
Just wondering if you really mean RAM (physical memory) or if you mean virtual memory? A Window box can't have more physical RAM in use than it has real memory installed; it can easily (and at very little performance cost) have more virtual memory in use than it has real memory.
It's quite easy, and relatively harmless, to have 4GB of virtual memory allocated to an application but only actually be using a small part of real RAM.
Chunks of code and data which have been used but are not physically in use at any given point in time don't need to live in real memory (RAM), they can be moved out to disk (eg the pagefile).
If that disk is an SSD, the performance hit is even smaller, and there may be other benefits with an SSD too (e.g. faster completion of booting, faster initial loading of applications, etc).
I'm not saying Firefox isn't bloated, but if people are going to claim objective measurements it'd be good if they understood what was being measured.
Apologies if this was a lesson in egg-sucking, but these things seem to get forgotten as time goes by.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
