Firefox Granparadiso + Patch and tweak

[Jim McQuillan]

Jim Kronebusch wrote:
> On Thu, 20 Sep 2007 07:42:20 -0400, Jim McQuillan wrote
>> Gavin,
>>
>> Great stuff.  Thanks for getting the info and summarizing it.
>>
>> This all leads me to believe that the Xclient applications just need to 
>> behave better than they do.
>>
>> Firefox loads up a page from a website.  Each image on the page gets 
>> sent to the Xserver in anticipation of being needed soon.  Even if the 
>> user never scrolls the page down to the point where the images are 
>> exposed.  Also, if you are on a page, and you click a link on the page, 
>> the images from the first page stay in the Xserver, with the 
>> anticipation that you might click the Back-button and return to the page.
>>
>> It sounds like the patch from Federico helps this.  Although I haven't 
>> had a chance to look at it yet, to see how it does this.
>>
>> Have we gotten the attention from anyone in the Firefox world to help us 
>> out?
>>
>> Maybe we could have a meeting about this at UDS in Boston.
> 
> I think a discussion on pixmap usage in general and its effect on thin client and low
> ram systems would be an excellent topic.  My opinion is that X's inability to
> communicate with the Xclients on how much memory is available and how much can be used
> is a huge flaw and any discussion can only lead to something good.  If nothing else
> hopefully Ubuntu in general can know this is something they should pay attention to.
> 
> Firefox and OpenOffice are the big hitters.  I have not looked to OpenOffice at all yet,
> maybe I can start bombarding their mailing lists next week :-)
> 
> I am wondering about your patch (or is it Scott's?) to implement X_RAMPERC.  This looks
> at general RAM usage right?  Could it be modified, or could a second X_PIXMAP be used to
> monitor pixmap storage?  The suggestion to monitor usage with xrestop from the xorg list
> and build that into something made me wonder if this would work.

I wrote the first X_RAMPERC for LTSP-4.2 and Scott adapted it to LTSP-5. 
  All it's doing is setting a ulimit in the kernel to not allow any 
specific process to consume more than a certain amount of ram.  The 
problem is, the specific process we have it set for is the Xserver.  we 
can't get it any finer-grained than that.


Jim McQuillan
jam at Ltsp.orgt