On Fri, Mar 17, 2006 at 10:26:29PM -0300, Leonardo Rodrigues wrote: > Hello all! > This is my first mail for this community. Have been running OpenBSD on > a HP Pavilion zv5445us laptop for quite some time, and am enjoying the > the experience (and the learning) of using OBSD. > > The problem is, while using firefox to browse between tabs, i've > experienced an annoying lag while changing from one tab to another, > especially if one of the tabs is still loading the site. Tried with > firefox downloaded from packages (snapshot) on an FTP site, and with a > firefox compiled from source (ports-cvs). > > Am I missing something here? Should I add something specific to the makefile? > >
I think[*] this is because pthreads/the kernel are more "optimized" for server usage. If you have a webserver which gives data out to multiple clients, you want it to finish one thread as fast as possible and not give everybody the data in small pieces. This is not ideal for desktop systems and can result in the behaviour you describe. One firefox thread uses all available cpu power, and the interface or the other tab you want to switch to gets nothing for a small, but noticable amount of time. There is a lot more interessting stuff about this topic, eg. lightweight threads vs processes and so on. But i'll shut up now, maybe i'm wrong. Tobias [*] That means have no clue what i'm talking about ;)
