[Cialug] Web Slowing Down

[Daniel A. Ramaley]

On 2009-03-11 at 09:00:04, Matthew Nuzum wrote:
>On Wed, Mar 11, 2009 at 8:49 AM, Daniel A. Ramaley
><daniel.ramaley at drake.edu> wrote:
>> I do notice, however, that with Gmail open i get a "xulrunner-bin"
>> process running constantly and using whatever free CPU is available.
>
>You probably have gears installed.

What is gears? Do you mean this? http://gears.google.com/
I do not have that installed. When i visit the page it says my browser 
isn't even supported. Which is strange since right under that it lists 
the requirements as Linux, Firefox 1.5+, 32-bit OS. Which is exactly 
what this PC has. Maybe because Debian rebranded Firefox as 
"Iceweasel"; that sometimes causes problems with websites identifying 
the browser correctly.

>The advice about closing gmail is good - arguably for system
>perforrnance, but definitely for your productivity. Close the email
>program, close twitter, set IM/IRC to away, put the phone on DND and
>focus. Works great for me.

I don't use G-mail very often on my work PC and don't knowingly have any 
IM programs installed (i'm sure there are several on the machine that 
were pulled in as dependencies, but i didn't consciously choose to 
install them and don't use them). At home i just leave Gmail and IM 
open constantly though. But my computer usage is rather different at 
home and at work. At home, mostly casual web browsing, e-mail, chatting 
with friends, and even the occasional game. At work i try to avoid the 
fluff, with the exception of mailing lists.

>Regarding nesting tags, you can install greacemonkey in firefox and
>install the "Folders4Gmail" user script and it lets you nest tags. You
>name your tags something like this:

Yep, that's what i use to get folders. I have it installed in most of my 
Firefox installs. I wonder if Folders4Gmail is what pegs the CPU? I've 
never cared enough to try disabling it to see if there is a difference. 
Someday i'll dig into it, but i don't actually notice the load from 
xulrunner except in that it shows up in top. Sometimes i renice the 
process to +19 and that makes it use slightly less CPU, but doesn't 
change how responsive Firefox is. I've also tried killing xulrunner-bin 
but that causes Firefox to die hard. But basically the computers i use 
are fast enough that whatever xulrunner-bin is doing doesn't seem to 
affect my experience as a user. Next time i go on a tuning spree and 
try to make the computer's operation more closely approximate what i 
expect of it, i'll dig into the xulrunner issue some more.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dan Ramaley                            Dial Center 118, Drake University
Network Programmer/Analyst             2407 Carpenter Ave
+1 515 271-4540                        Des Moines IA 50311 USA