Trying to overcome memory management issue
 

Is there a way to force more usage of the swap file area to obtain better performance with memory hungry applications like Firefox?

I would like to be able to start Firefox while opening 20 tabs. Also, believing strongly in multitasking, I like being able to run multiple large or sometimes complex applications and having the ability to simply switch between and not having to start and stop applications from running just to realize having significant power and control within a app at any given time.

I'm not sure why you would want to force swap usage but you might find this relevant

Are you actually running out of memory or suffering performance hits when starting firefox?

Hi Datamac - what is your physical memory config and current usage metrics when running your multiple applications ?

wow, sounds like you're a power user.
certainly your beliefs reflect in your choice of hardware?

joking aside, there's something called 'swappiness' (kernel command line option i guess) which would answer your question but i don't think it will help.

oh and do post those hardware specs, will you?

also post the ouput of this command:

xyproblem.
Show us evidence you actually have a problem - as in metrics, not (perceived) symptoms. Then maybe we can offer advice.

You can change the swappiness value. 60 tends to be the default. 20 is more performant if you AVOID swap. So maybe 90 for your intentions? And probably some other tricks like don't load a tab until it's active type settings in firefox.

# echo 85 > /proc/sys/vm/swappiness

Although with the price of hardware being cheap these days. Perhaps get more ram and stop caring about that particular aspect. A fitlet-H with 16GB ram and some storage would only run you about $500 and spec similar to a macbook pro these days. Sort of.

If you should succeed in forcing memory out to your swap partition
you can guarantee that everything will run much slower.

Does Firefox give any error message when you try to open 20 tabs, or does it just crash? If it just crashes, try running Firefox from the Terminal to get detailed output. Either way, please copy and paste the error messages here if you want any meaningful help.

A few more thoughts:

Have you tried a different browser like Chrome?

What is your graphics chipset (GPU) and have you installed the correct drivers for it if necessary?

Can you increase the RAM on your computer or is it maxed out?

Generally forcing RAM to SWAP is like robbing Peter to pay Paul. And I doubt you will get the performance gains that you are desiring. As others have already said, it would be best to add more RAM and SSD if possible for increased performance.