What I do, when Chrome, or rather, my abuse of it (14 windows, 735 tabs at the moment, Ubuntu 14.04 64 bit on a 32 GiB system) becomes onerous is to go to the task manager and kill groups of tabs taking up "too much" memory, and very occasionally, too much CPU. (I get away with that abuse, which it a bit higher right now because I'm in the process of buying a house, by killing all tabs after launching, and only enabl…
I'm genuinely interested in the reasons people maintain so many tabs open. What type of workflow you have when you end up with so much stuff open? How do you get back to some of those tabs? Wouldn't it be easier to just google it again when you need it instead of having it lingering around and wasting your HW resources?
First, echoing some other comments, this is a test of these web browsers. My Pale Moon instance (a Firefox fork), which I use much less "actively" and with NoScript running on it, has 42 windows with 2119 tabs, but Firefox is smart about only loading tabs on demand. On the other hand, I have to restart Palemoon regularly, to prevent it from getting unhappy I do so on every even numbered day. I also run a Firefox instance with 12 windows and 62 tabs.
The workflow is roughly:
Windows cover one or a related set of subjects. I know by position which are were, and hit specific tabs at regular schedules. Any site I hit multiple times a day has its window on that tab.
Additional tabs are of course things to get back to. Maybe to digest at a later time, maybe only if an issue is still relevant. I do regularly archive whole windows or most of them using Session Buddy or Session Manager for Firefox/Palemoon.
For me, this sort of spacial navigation works a lot better than any bookmark system or the like that i've seen. I have very very good 3D spacial ability (organic chemistry was easy), so I'm sure that's a major factor in why this is right for me and wouldn't be right for many others.
And at this very moment those hardware resources are for the wasting, at some point after I buy my house, move into it, and my life is 1/10 as crazy as it is now I hope to e.g. be running serious and hungry proof assistants and other stuff, circumstances right now have me using it for little more than a media machine, with the web most certainly being a media. Heck, at this moment, I have one almost as capable machine with 16 GiB only hosting a LTO-4 tape drive.
ADDED: this is on a stationary workstation, so all the problems that might crop up with limited mobile connectivity or screens less than 1080p with a 24 inch diagonal. NEC still makes some fine monitors with very long warranties.