why is firefox such a CPU hog?

[john]

Hi Asmo,

On Mon, Nov 16, 2009 at 10:36 AM,  <asmo.koskinen at arkki.info> wrote:

> 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.

They are probably surfing all of the above, since that is the nature
of the web these days. I think If
LTSP is going to be viable it has to be able to work at least as well
as other computers that kids use
e.g. 4 year old stand alone workstations, 2Ghz, running WinXP with 512
mb ram. If LTSP/Ubuntu can't manage that the students and teachers
don't tend
to be sympathetic. We are using google apps a lot these days, and it
would be a bad thing for the future of LTSP at our district if we
figured out that LTSP wasn't up to Web 2.0 or what have you.



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

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

Thanks, I am defiantly looking around for Firefox optimization tricks,
although this link is about memory issues and my problem seems to be
CPU usage on the server. Running top on the thin clients shows me that
I have ram to spare.

>
> You remember lynx... ;-)
Yes! And I use it or one of it's cousins to this day.


As I said, my question is partly a philiopical rumination e.g I am
really wondering why Linux/LTSP can be brought to it's knees by a
single user running a web-browser.

Thanks for responding,

John