So I think the interesting question is: when you run into a large, bloated, unwieldy POS codebase, how do you fix it? You obviously need some buy-in from management, but you also need a plan that doesn't start with "stop what we are doing and get everyone to spend all of their time rewriting what we have" or "hire a ton of new devs."
I have seen smaller versions of what the OP describes. My plan was that every new piece of code that was checked in had to meet certain guidelines for clarity--like can the dev sitting next to you understand it with little to no introduction--and particularly knotty pieces of existing code deserved a bug report just to rewrite and untangle the knots.
In the end, whatever your plan, I think what you need is a cultural change, and cultures are notoriously difficult to change. Any cultural change is going to have to start high up in the organization with the realization that the codebase is an unsustainable POS.
I have seen the same thing. Typically I have half a dozen doc tabs open and sometimes I have a calendar tab open but not too often.
What I really hate is when I have 10 tabs open and I have to restart FireFox because it is over 1 GB of virtual memory: I don't want to have to reopen all of the tabs again. So I use Process Explorer to kill off FireFox. When I restart it, FireFox gives me the chance to restore my last session, which I do. FireFox is then back running again with all of the tabs that were there when I killed it and memory usage is down to a fraction of what it was before.
I have seen smaller versions of what the OP describes. My plan was that every new piece of code that was checked in had to meet certain guidelines for clarity--like can the dev sitting next to you understand it with little to no introduction--and particularly knotty pieces of existing code deserved a bug report just to rewrite and untangle the knots.
In the end, whatever your plan, I think what you need is a cultural change, and cultures are notoriously difficult to change. Any cultural change is going to have to start high up in the organization with the realization that the codebase is an unsustainable POS.