why is firefox such a CPU hog?

[john]

On Mon, Nov 16, 2009 at 12:10 PM, Scott Balneaves
<sbalneav at legalaid.mb.ca> wrote:

>
> LTSP is NOT a panacea.  A thin client will never, EVER be 100% of the
> experience of a full workstation.  We've done lots of things to make LTSP as
> "like" a full workstation as we can, with things like Localapps, that allows
> you to offload some of the work on the thin client itself.  There's also
> Stephane's ltsp-cluster work which can also address this problem.

Hi Scott et al,

I just got to wondering (in an idle sort of way) why applications like
openoffice  which is so much bigger than firefox seem to run just fine
with 24 copies open and firefox doesn't? Way back when -- I remember
folks touting the efficient way that OO used memory, and in fact some
folks left a version running all the time so that kids would have
there instance open even faster. A sort of crude pre-linking. The idea
back then was that another oowriter instance was just another thread
off the parent, as I remember it. Was that a fundamental
misunderstanding of the way stuff worked under 4.2 or is Firefox or
flash written in a much less scalable way than OO? Or something else
entirely. I guess I am still trying to grok Firefox/flash as the thing
which makes Linux show its rough edges.

Just sort of interested...

John