Memory heat will go up with heavy usage, yes.
Get a square of plywood or shelving material and put it under the machine to lift it off the carpet (good idea for any computer, or battery backup, or any other component that generates heat, BTW.)
😱 it take 7-8 seconds for firefox to load after a reboot and I have no apps set to start on login. is there something wrong? 😱
7 - 8 seconds? And you're complaining?
When you reboot, the memory is flushed, so the application is not in the Inactive memory any longer. This means it has to be read off of the hard drive and loaded into memory. That takes longer than switching between 2 programs that are already loaded and running.