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

[William Fragakis]

Hi,
FF3 under certain situations can devote a decent amount of cpu when the
history sidebar is open.

Also, if anyone knows how to install the adblock plugin across all the
users, that'd be helpful in cutting down flash ads and unnecessary
graphics.
Regards,
William

On Fri, 2008-08-22 at 12:00 -0400, k12osn-request at redhat.com wrote:
> Message: 2
> Date: Thu, 21 Aug 2008 13:20:42 -0400
> From: "David Hopkins" <dahopkins429 at gmail.com>
> Subject: [K12OSN] Sky high load average with FF and CentOS?
> To: "Support list for open source software in schools."
>         <k12osn at redhat.com>
> Message-ID:
>         <bad371bd0808211020s308fd38fx931e7f66845e1a84 at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
> 
> 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
>