[26953] in Athena Bugs
Re: Firefox 1.5 load times
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Robert Basch)
Fri Sep 8 17:38:23 2006
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From: Robert Basch <rbasch@mit.edu>
Date: Fri, 8 Sep 2006 17:38:05 -0400
To: John Hawkinson <jhawk@mit.edu>
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On Sep 8, 2006, at 12:50 PM, John Hawkinson wrote:
> A user came by SIPB and demonstrated firefox taking about three
> minutes to load on zsr.mit.edu, an Athena Linux machine.
It looks like part of the problem here is that firefox will update the
extensions data in your profile directory when you run it on a
different machine from the previous running, because the mod
times on the extensions directories are different on each machine.
On Linux, Red Hat installs 30-some language pack extensions,
and the profile update is apparently quite inefficient, so this
introduces a significant delay in startup -- but still "only" about
15-20 seconds on my machine; assuming other users are also
seeing ridiculous start-up times on Linux, I'm guessing that
poor network and/or AFS performance is a major culprit.
On Solaris, there are only three extensions (including ours),
so I think the start-up delay there is mostly attributable to
poor network and poor performance on the Sun Blade 100.
But I will look into ways we might improve things.
Bob
