I am also a tabaholic, often running 5+ windows, some with many dozens of tabs and some with just a handful. I use them for easy context switching. If I am in programming mode I switch to the relevant window, sometimes a separate window for each language I am programming in at the moment, for games and leisure, a different window, for news and related, yet another, for general internet use, yet another.

I tend to use Firefox, with its default behaviour of only loading tabs that are active (a huge memory saver) and easy use of NoScript. I also use Great Suspender for Chrome to try control its excessive memory use - works well.

BTW. If you have a lot of HN tabs open and you try to reload a session after a restart, you get IP blocked for a short time - another good reason to use Firefox if you like keeping a few HN news tabs open, as it only loads 1 tab and keeps background tabs suspended.

I have tried active session managers but after several problems with corruption of sessions I reverted back to multiple windows and tabs.