[K12OSN] Crashing Firefox on terminal in new un-messed with install

[Toshio Kuratomi]

On Sat, 2006-04-08 at 18:18 -0700, Eric Harrison wrote:
> On Sat, 8 Apr 2006, Robert Arkiletian wrote:
> > This probably has nothing to do with your problem but I just thought
> > I'd put this out there.
> > Are you running Firefox 1.5 ?
> > Cause I think it has this "feature" that consumes much more ram ( on
> > the terminal server ) to accelerate the back and forward navigation.
> > That's why I'm sticking with 1.0.7. Although after reading this thread
> > I'm wondering if it also consumes more ram on the X server (the
> > client)?
> 
> The new Firefox feature that increases the amount of ram used is
> disabled in the version of Firefox 1.5.x that will ship with
> K12LTSP.
> 
> To double-check (or to set it if you are using a non-K12LTSP
> firefox 1.5), startup firefox, in the URL bar type "about:config",
> in the Filter bar type "browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers".
> The value of this parameter should be 0. If it is -1, you can set
> it to 0 to turn it off.

There are several firefox-1.5isms (and some firefoxisms present in 1.0.x
as well) that cause non-optimal performance in low memory situations.  I
think the one that concerns us the most has to do with firefox storing
images in the X Server.  Since the X Server is running locally on the
LTSP Client, this has much more of an impact than firefox storing a
history of pages on the LTSP Server.

Here's a blog posting by Daniel Berrange talking about one of the bugs
in this area:
http://berrange.com/personal/diary/2006/03/epiphany-memory-use-analysis

Some followup conversation on the OneLaptopPerChild mailing list
revealed that this was due to a bug in the accessibility framework and
was resolved in this bug:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=330624

(The bug is fixed in gecko 1.8.0.3 - I'm not sure which firefox version
this will equate to.)

Federico Mena-Quintero has an interesting writeup that demonstrates
several alternatives to firefox's current method of saving pixmaps in
the X Server:
http://primates.ximian.com/~federico/news-2005-11.html#24

-Toshio
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