I usually use chrome and Firefox for browsing. I also open many tabs (around 40 in both some times).
The problem I have occurs when I resume the PC after having suspended it: It takes from 2 to 5 minutes sometimes to just get back normally.
Does this have to do with memory usage not properly resuming? Is it a bug in Chrome/Firefox or Ubuntu itself?
Note that I just upgraded from 10.10 to 11.10 and I was having the problem on both releases, which makes me guess that it has to do with Ubuntu not resuming well if some memory-heavy apps were running before the suspend occured.
I think this could be expected. Hibernation / resume time depends on the amount of RAM the system has, regardless of how much of the RAM is actually used. It makes no difference whether you have 1 or 100 programs open, it will still take the same time.
After getting a new high-end notebook that seemed slower on resuming than my older notebook I learned that the more RAM a system has, the more time it will take to hibernate and resume. There is also data compression / decompression involved in hibernating so this is also a factor if you have more stuff in memory. A few minutes wait time is to be expected, and on high end - ram packed machines it does take longer.
Hope this helps, cheers!
The issue is not the RAM size, it just depends on the amount of programs you have running.
I've been using my computer for about 2 hours now and have some programs open (total RAM usage for all this incl kernel is 700MB) Chrome is open with 6 tabs (another 900MB RAM).
Hibernate takes 30 seconds, wakeup takes 2 minutes before the system is fully responsive (same moment disk activity LED stops burning). However, kernel messages show that hibernation finished after just 20 seconds and indeed, after those 20 seconds i could see my desktop and move the mouse, it's just that the systeem remains quite unresponsive and especially Chrome.
Closing chrome (it runs in the background so you need to click the task-bar icon and exit to 'really' close it, or just kill the processes) makes wake-up go to 30 seconds. Opening up chrome again and opening 6 tabs takes it back up to 1m50.
It's just a matter of what programs you have running and chrome appears to be a really heavy factor in that.