Konqueror vs Firefox

[Nathan Grennan]

David Boles wrote:
> You are going to have explain the logic for this one for me to 
> understand.
>
> "Excessive fsync during a kernel compile causes Firefox 3 become
> completely unresponsive till the fsyncs are complete. In some cases if
> something else i/o intensive is going on Firefox 3 will freeze till the
> other i/o has completely finished. If it gets really really bad other
> applications start freezing."
>
> You were doing something as intensive as compiling a kernel and Firefox
> became "unresponsive" and that is Firefox's fault?
>
  It is about perspective. From one perspective it is Firefox 3's fault, 
in another it is the ext3 code's fault.

  In the first perspective Firefox 2 and Firefox 3.0b2 don't do it, but 
Firefox 3.0b3 and later do. In general I would say it might even be fine 
for Firefox to do one fsync per page, but it seems to do like eight back 
to back. Which in my book is excessive. Maybe there is a good reason for 
it, maybe it can be improved. I don't claim to know much about Firefox 
3's code, but I can give the evidence to the programmers and let them 
sort it out.

  In the second perspective it is more of a problem with ext3 code. It 
doesn't handle fsyncs that well when it comes to responsiveness. I do 
plan to take this up with the maintainers of the ext3 code. If I can't 
get them to fix this to my satisfaction I will switch to another 
filesystem, and maybe another distribution that supports that filesystem 
well.