[Xprint] xprint 009 and firefox 0.8

[Roland Mainz]

Matthew Hooper wrote:
> With your build of Firefox for Solaris, is it built with support for
> multiple processors?

I didn't alter anything special like threading support - everying which
was used to build FireFox is described in the README and
about:buildconfig.
Mozilla/FireFox/ThunderBird are running the GUI, rendering and event
queue processing in the same thread and other threads are only used to
offload tasks like networking support etc. (basically a
"single-threaded"-like design which uses other threads for
"helper"-purposes) ...

... but before I ask more let's check the most common source for
problems with Mozilla/FireFox/ThunderBird - missing OS patches:
Do you have all Solaris/SPARC patches listed in
http://lxr.mozilla.org/seamonkey/source/xpfe/bootstrap/init.d/moz_patch_checker.dtksh#53
installed in your system ?

> We've been having some load issues

Can you be little bit more specific what happens ? Does it help when you
use pbind(1m) to force one FireFox process to use exactly only ONE CPU ?

> on our server which
> has 4 processors and 4 Gig of memory with around 60+ firefox sessions,

Are you running the SunRay software ?
If "yes" - does it help when you start FireFox like this
% (export XSUNTRANSPORT="blablabla" ; ./firefox)

> and
> I was wondering if the -02 option

"-O2" ? I guess you mean "-xO2", right ? Mozilla.org default is -"xO4"
but I have lowered that to "-xO2" to avoid bugs in the Sun
Workshop/Forte compilers... I am trading 5%-25% performance reduction
for stability here since I prefer stabilty little bit over performance
(crashing binaries aren't good - nor are random bugs caused by compiler
bugs) ... :)

> might make some difference in regard to
> this as well - processors aside?

Mozilla and FireFox are generally resource hogs (both CPU and memory)
and there cannot be done much about that except hoping that the code
becomes better over the time... ;-(
BTW: There are nightly contrib builds for FireFox available under
ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/contrib/latest-trunk/
... maybe they work better for you...

----

Bye,
Roland

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