why is firefox such a CPU hog?

[john]

Hi Gavin,

On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 2:10 AM, Gavin McCullagh <gmccullagh at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> 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.

Point well taken.


> 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).

I'll be looking into gnash.

>
> 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.

I hear what your saying. I'll look at this approach as well. As I
mentioned I am also looking at getting Karmic + a more robust TC into
service as well.

I appreciate all of these insights. I feel smarter already!

John