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

[David Hopkins]

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.

Anyhow, sorry for the rant, but this is happening with the teachers
just logging in. Students show up next week.

Sincerely,
Dave Hopkins