Firefox' memory nightmares

Something I experienced yesterday totally baffled me. I left my computer for a while, with firefox and xchat running, and when I came back, woke the screen up my hard drive was screeching to hell, everything slowed down to a halt to a point that even the mouse movements were breaking. After I finally managed to take a look at the stats I saw that about 900MB of my memory was in use and about 500MB more in swap.

Incredible. And I thought having 1GB of RAM would guarantee that swapping, especially this dramatic, would never happen.

Firefox shown to be using roughly 600MB of RAM, but I suspect that it was even more. What else could have done it anyway?

After this I'm left wondering whether any amount of RAM would be enough for running firefox for a prolonged amount of time and with multiple tabs and also whether Mozilla Corp. (or Foundation, either way) really has any valid excuses for keeping this issue unfixed for so long.

I've read them describing what people called "memory leaks" as a feature, trying to disprove a "myth" (which memory leaks are supposed to be I guess). From what I vaguely remember the feature has something to do with reserving memory for tabs so that they open faster, or something like that.

But.. even if this is really meant as a feature, it can't bloody be working that well if it pushes memory use to such extremes. No matter how you look at it, this is a bug, a monster of a bug, don't you think?

I wonder... just how far can Firefox really go? Those of you who have more than 1GB of RAM, how much RAM has Firefox taken the most? Also, are there any good workarounds that you know of?

Thanks