#DearMastomind: What is it that actually makes system performance under heavy Web use slow?

Is it just memory exhaustion? Disk swapping? CPU / cores?

(Omitting any consideration of network / bandwidth here. Just looking at slow-as-fuck desktop/laptop systems.)

This with an eye to speccing out some new kit. Guides to what to look for / avoid / what's unnecessary expense would be handy.

(Main driver is an iMac 17,1 Intel Core5 8 GB RAM & Fusion drive, which I manage to pig out routinely.)

Thinking 16--32 GB RAM may be a minimum. Principally driving Firefox on Linux. Known high-water mark is 1750+ tabs. Yes, I know I have a problem, thank you for caring.

I've written Chrome AND Chromium, as well as anything based on them, out of my life.

Other loads are typically far smaller, though there may be some compiles, occasional large datasets (postgresql, sqlite, R, Python), and document compiles (LaTeX, pandoc), light audio/image edits. Mostly I live in bash / vim / mutt if at all possible.

#ComputerHardware #SystemPerformance #Firefox #Webbrowsing