[K12OSN] Sky high load average with FF and CentOS?

Nils Breunese nils at breun.nl
Thu Aug 21 17:58:33 UTC 2008


David Hopkins wrote:

> An interesting (some might say irrititating) problem.  Rebuilt a
> server with CentOS EL5, upgraded to 5.2  Users are running FF3, Adobe
> Acrobat Reader, and StarOffice.  Things work well until reach around
> 28 users. Then, it just crawls and the load  average shoots up to 20+
> (this is a 4 processor box with 15Krpm SCSI drives in a RAID 1, home
> directories are on a dedicated file server).  It was running FC6 with
> 40+ users without issues last year, but I decided to move to CentOS.
> I have no idea why the system would suddenly become so unresponsive.
> I want to 'guess' that it is FF related, especially based on the
> google searches concerning FF3 and performance.  Also, FF is using is
> using 50%+ of the cpu per user.   I have to admit that I am rather
> upset at the moment with FF3, and when I tried the simple approach to
> untarring a build of FF2, I get all sort of errors related to
> libraries.

We used Firefox 2 from a tarball for a while when CentOS 5 still had  
Firefox 1.5. We're on Firefox 3 now since CentOS 5.2 comes with that.  
Both work fine for us, but we have just 10 seats. Can you see what  
contributes most to the load? System, user, iowait, etc.?

Nils Breunese.




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