why is firefox such a CPU hog?

[Robert Arkiletian]

On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 8:29 AM, Scott Balneaves
<sbalneav at legalaid.mb.ca> wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 16, 2009 at 04:57:31PM -0800, 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?
>
> Well, I think firefox will too.  Here's a test: get your 24 students to JUST
> browse around on a site that doesn't involve any Java, or flash.  Something
> like wikipedia.  I *know*, that they'll be able to do it just fine.  Because
> wikipedia pages load, and then they just sit there.  Sure, you scroll around,
> but all the processing's mainly done: now you're just scrolling around in a
> page.
>
> This is exactly the same as openoffice.  Once it's loaded, it's loaded.  You
> scroll around in the doc, but you're not doing anything computationally
> intense.
>
>> 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.
>
> This is still the case, for both FF an OpenOffice.
>
>> 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
>
> Problem is *entirely* flash.  Because it just sits there and keeps chewing up
> cycles.  Web animations.  Ads.  Videos.  If there's 4 or five flash apps on a
> page (say, 3 flash ads, 1 menu application, and a video), each consuming a
> significant % of the cpu's cycles, *one page from one browser* can peg a
> machine.  Now multiply this by the other 23 terminals.
>

Not only that. Each instance of Flash is multi threaded.

Here's hoping Google/Youtube moves to an Open standard. I'm crossing
my fingers that Google's purchase of On2 will kill Flash.


-- 
Robert Arkiletian
Eric Hamber Secondary, Vancouver, Canada