why is firefox such a CPU hog?

[Joseph Hartman]

Hi John, I may be wrong but I think the issue is primarily with flash. I may
be completely incorrect here but I ran into the same thing a while back and
if I remember correctly (and was told correctly in the first place) the fact
is that flash is being processed at the server rather than the clients and
then the server is trying to push those processes across the LAN instead of
just forwarding the packets to the individual client for processing. Google
Apps has a similar issue since it is quite resource intensive as well. You
could uninstall flash if you want (which is what I did) but your solution
lies in local apps, as anything short of an all gigabit LAN is going to have
the same troubles. 2 Ghz 512 MB RAM is more than adequate. I'm running
firefox as a local app on a server similar to yours with 800 Mhz P3 clients
w/ 256 MB RAM and Google Apps works acceptably well (which means it runs as
well as it would on a stand alone machine of the same specs). Flash is still
really slow, but P4s would handle it fine. If you want to move to Karmic
with local apps I'm available to help you through the process. It would only
take a couple of hours. -joe

On Mon, Nov 16, 2009 at 11:08 AM, john <lists.john at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
>
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