tips for Opera users

[Gavin McCullagh]

Hi,

I got the patch to apply and work.  I can't say for sure that it will fix
your issue but it might at least alleviate it.

If I understand correctly, Federico's patch doesn't change the fact that
firefox has to load all of the images, as pixmaps, into video ram to
display the page.  I presume all browsers must at some stage load each
image in that way.  It seems his patch causes the pixmaps to be removed
after a short period, unless the particular picture is actually on-screen
at that moment.

	http://primates.ximian.com/~federico/news-2007-09.html

This seems to work well enough.  However, if you try to quickly scroll
through the screen quickly, you'll see the video RAM spike to similar
values as before as every image has to be painted before any get removed.
For this reason, I think it'll still be possible to crash the thin client,
though perhaps it'll be less likely, as firefox will be purging memory.

One small part of the patch is:

+static int
+get_discard_timer_ms (void)
+{
+  /* FIXME: don't hardcode this */
+  return 5000; /* 5 seconds */
+}

which suggests the time limit is 5 seconds.  We could perhaps try lowering
this to make the cache time shorter and make the crash less likely.

On Tue, 18 Sep 2007, Gavin McCullagh wrote:

> > http://www.carteretcountyschools.org/bms/teacherwebs/sdavenport/artgallery6.htm)

> res-base Wins  GCs Fnts Pxms Misc   Pxm mem  Other   Total   PID Identifier   
> 6400000   276  477    1  381  608   294074K     32K 294107K 21296 Mrs.  Davenport's Web - Gran Paradiso

At different moments with that webpage loaded, I now get:

res-base Wins  GCs Fnts Pxms Misc   Pxm mem  Other   Total   PID Identifier   
4c00000   110   99    1   48   88   281122K      7K 281130K 23604 Mrs. Davenport's Web - Gran Paradiso
4c00000   110   80    1   29   69    66303K      7K  66310K 23604 Mrs. Davenport's Web - Gran Paradiso
4c00000   139  125    1   57  144      550K     10K    561K 23604 Mrs.  Davenport's Web - Gran Paradiso

the bottom one is where firefox is on a different virtual desktop and is
therefore not being painted at all.  The top is where I'm scrolling through
the page and the middle is just sitting on the page.

Firefox is very slow at rendering this page now.  Every time I go back to
that desktop, there's a delay in rendering it.  However, perhaps that's not
as bad as a crash.  The machine I'm on is a dual core 64-bit athlon with
some sort of flashy ATI video card, but I am using the vesa driver (to
avoid proprietary video driver), which is not the quickest thing.

Gavin