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

[David Hopkins]

On Thu, Aug 21, 2008 at 1:58 PM, Nils Breunese <nils at breun.nl> wrote:
> 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.?
>

Unfortunately, I can't at the moment. But ... tonight I am going to
stress test the system thanks to the wonderful package called
fl_teachertool and the Run option it has. I'll login all the systems
in the tech lab (32 systems) and then launch FF against some
flash-heavy site for all accounts, launch staroffice for some more,
etc.  I have 0.6 installed, and I think this will let me finally have
a way to stress test.  Not sure why I didn't think of this earlier.

I'll also try downloading Opera and seeing if it is transparent enough
for the teachers.

Sincerely,
Dave Hopkins