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

[Warren Togami]

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

There was a bug in FF3 that shipped with the original 5.2 that caused 
major CPU spikes.  Did you install all the updates after installing 5.2?

Warren