Memory Question - System Crippled - SWAP?

[FullScale4Me]

On some browsers turning off "Use hardware acceleration when available" has been shown to reduce resource spiking and in a few cases machine lockup.

Adblockers can also help. Blocked = 0% CPU.

[Stevo]

Yes, all those dancing ad animations you see on a web page are munching away on your precious, precious RAM.

There are some Plasma toolbar widgets that will allow you to keep an eye on used memory in real time, though just tracking the usage also eats a little memory.

[FullScale4Me]

In Firefox no plugin required to see CPU & memory per tab Task Manager - see whether tabs or extensions are slowing down Firefox

[BitterTruth]

What do you think of XFCE or maybe going the window manager route? Changing to a lighter desktop environment (or a window manager) will reduce your ram usage. On my main rig, I have MX19.4, awesome window manager, and with 14 tabs open in chrome, I'm using 1.53 gb. You can also enable the 'unload inactive tabs' setting in firefox and chrome to help save on the ram usage that inactive tabs are taking up

EDIT: I have 4gb ram total installed.