why is firefox such a CPU hog?

[asmo.koskinen at arkki.info]

> This is sort of a general question. I have a quad core AMD server with
> 16 Gigs of ram.  I am running Hardy 2.6.24-25-server #1 SMP
> This morning with 16 users logged on my load average was 16 to 20 and
> I noticed that a single firefox process was taking 95% of my CPU.

Do you know what they are doing/what kind of web pages they are surfing -
flash, java, lots of pictures, some kind of embedded movies or embedded
audio players, lots of popup windows and so on - FF has n+1 plugins - bad,
bad dog. But maybe FF is not so bad, but bad design for web pages can do
that.

If you google 'ltsp firefox optimize' you find this example:

"First, considering the X server/client architecture, I noticed that
transferring large images between a client and a server involves a raw
image transfer, which means around 47 MBs for a 5000x1224 32 bits jpeg
(=4.7 second on a 100mbit line).

Second, storing a 47 MBs image on a thin client quickly crashes the X
server since some of them have 64 MB of RAM total (The crash is caused
by the kernel to protect itself from reaching an out-of-memory state)."

http://groups.google.com/group/mozilla.dev.tech.gfx/browse_thread/thread/b73e3cf79530ddc3

You remember lynx... ;-)

Best Regards Asmo Koskinen.