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

[Christian Einfeldt]

hi

On Mon, Aug 25, 2008 at 6:38 AM, Lewis Holcroft <lewis at pcc.com> wrote:

> David,
>
> We are having this FF3 slowness issue also.
>

We are also having this same problem in San Francisco, California, in a
public middle school running ff 3 on Hardy Ubuntu with Hardy Xubuntu
clients.  Our lab is run entirely by volunteers, as the school has no money
for a tech guy for kids' needs, only teacher needs!  (This is a _very_ poor
inner city school in SF).

Here are the Firefox (ff) issues:  ff seemed to hand for about 90 seconds or
so.  The kids logged in.  Clicked on ff.  Nothing happened.  The ff start-up
ball spun around, indicating that it was starting, then it just failed.  We
made sure to tell the kids to click once and once only, and generally they
complied with that request.  Ff hung for about 90 seconds.  I then asked the
kids to click one more time on ff.  Ff then hung for another 15 seconds or
so, and then produced an error message saying that "Another copy of Ff is
currently running.  Please quit that copy of Ff first by clicking Okay when
you are ready" or something similar.  I had the kids click Okay, which
almost always caused Ff to finally appear after about 10 seconds.  So the
total time to launch ff was about 90 seconds + 15 second + 10 seconds =
about 1 minute 55 seconds or so.

It is worth noting this problem occurs _only_ when the kids are all
launching ff simultaneously.  It does _not_ occur when I am sitting alone in
the lab, as I am now.  My copy of ff launched quickly.

Here's what our local guru volunteer just told me.  (I am a level one
volunteer support guy who actually practices law for a living).   I had
suggested a reboot, but here's what he said:

"No, a reboot won't fix it. It's probably the local web server that's
serving up the automatic proxy config, the proxy server or the DNS
server. One or more of them are getting overwhelmed by 31 simultaneous
connection attempts.

"We can bump the number of threads on the proxy server so that it can
handle more concurrent requests. We can set the Firefox proxy settings
in the local config files so that Firefox doesn't need to hit the web
server when they start. And we can install local DNS caches on each
machine so that the DNS server load is lightened a bit."

Maybe this will help someone else here?

c u

-- 
Christian Einfeldt,
Producer, The Digital Tipping Point
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