why is firefox such a CPU hog?

[Gavin McCullagh]

Hi,

On Mon, 16 Nov 2009, john wrote:

> 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? 

I'd say it's down to the complexity and number of documents that the two
will open.  The vast bulk of users of openoffice have extremely simple
documents which, if you saved them as open document and extracted the XML,
firefox would probably quite happily display.

The number of documents which OpenOffice users would have which has >50
images, several of which are probably animated as well as an embedded
video or flash applet, is probably quite small.

I might be wrong but, I'd guess that if 24 of your users had a single
firefox tab open with a locally stored, plain text webpage with some
formatting and a couple of images, you'd probably find firefox behaving
very well.

> I guess I am still trying to grok Firefox/flash as the thing which makes
> Linux show its rough edges.

You're not seeing rough edges in linux, you're seeing rough edges in Flash.
If you had a Windows machine with 25 users running firefox+flash (or
IE+flash) on it, I suspect you'd see problems there too.  It is possible
(likely even) that Flash is better tuned for Windows than linux but sadly,
the only people who can address that are Adobe (or possibly gnash, who are
trying).

Most people seem to be saying that Flash is likely the problem.  I know for
a fact that flash loads in a lot more instances than people realise.  If
your users could be convinced, it would be interesting to remove flash
entirely for a day, just to see what effect it has.  If you didn't see an
improvement, then there's something wrong with firefox and we have some
chance of addressing that.  If Flash is the problem, adding the Flashblock
plugin would be a half-way point, where flash only loads on those pages
which users want it to.

Gavin