I figure it couldn’t hurt to give others suffering from plasma crashes some feedback on my experiences.
I’m not sure which web browsers most Garuda users run full time. I primarily use Firefox, although I do have several Chromium based browsers that I use occasionally. I will admit that I’m a browser tab hoarder, and sometimes I have 100+ tabs open in Firefox. I do use FF extensions that restrict the number of tabs that are actively loaded into memory. I have 32 GB of Ram, but I do notice plasma slow downs or crashes after I pass 12 GB or so of memory usage when FF is open.
When slowdowns or odd Plasma behavior starts to happen I will close Firefox, then I restart Plasma and Kwin, then I will flush my cached memory. After doing this I will have approx around ± 3 GB of memory usage and things run fine.
After a good while (can vary up to a day later) I may start experiencing poor plasma performance again and I will repeat the same process once more. A reboot will fix any poor performance issues, but I’m loath to reboot, so I put it off as long as possible by restarting plasma & Kwin and flushing my Ram cache.
Another issue I notice, is that a Plasma crash will occur if I leave FF open for an extended period (such as overnight) unattended. I do not hibernate or suspend my computer when it is not in use, but plasma will still crash if FF runs continually. If I shutdown FF before going to bed, plasma will not have crashed when I return to using the computer the next day.
Sure I could likely avoid these type of issues by rebooting at least daily, limiting my browser usage to only small amount of tabs, or possibly using an alternate browser. Unfortunately, I’m far too set in my ways to abandon 20+ years of Linux habits. So, I simply avoid most plasma instability issues by employing my workarounds.
That’s my 2 cents of advice, of course YMMV.