I'm surprised you're having issues with RAM. I had 1050 opened tabs in firefox nightly and my x201 (1st gen i5) has only 8GB and only 50% of it was used on average by ffx.
I'm not sure tab count is really a viable metric here. You'd think there'd be a strong correlation, but...
On one Windows PC, I keep 2-3 tabs constantly open (may as well pin them tbh), and open/close others as needed. Average tab footprint is probably 3-8 tabs. Average RAM footprint is 1700MB. I have different tab footprints on different machines, of all sorts of different hardware and OS combinations; let's say the general tab footprint is 5-30 tabs, and general memory footprint is 800MB-3GB.
On the other hand, one user here reported a few thousand tabs at ~500MB RSS.
Obviously factors like assets and JavaScript affect RAM consumption, but a lot of these heavy tab users have to be running a good number of web apps. There must be something else at play.
Depends on the tabs. I can get the Slack tab to eat over 6GB of memory if I just let it sit there without periodically reloading the tab... auto-reload extensions FTW.
Sure some web apps will naturally consume immense amout of ram. My tabs were not heavy apps, but diverse usual web pages github, hn, reddit, youtube, pubmed, wikipedia, pdfs etc