[K12OSN] Making thin clients "faster"

[Terrell Prude' Jr.]

Jesse McDonnell wrote:
> On Sun, 15 Nov 2009 09:25:38 +0000
> "Hamlesh [Personal]" <hm at motah.co.uk> wrote:
>
>   
>> Thanks for the input guys.
>>
>>     
>
>   
>> After sending my original email in, I found another 1Gb of RAM, and
>> put it in the server, its made a little bit of a difference, but some
>> websites still experience lag when scrolling.
>>
>>     
>
> Hamlesh,
>
> Are you running Firefox 3? In earlier versions of FF, sites that had lots of images would sometimes crash the xserver on the client as a result of using up all the client memory with cached images. This doesn't happen with FF3. It has been rewritten - all images are loaded on the server and transferred across the network without been written into client memory and FF crashing the client xserver is no more.
>
> The downside of this is the jitteriness that you are experiencing. On the same (very) graphic-heavy sites where Firefox 2 would sometimes crash (but was otherwise perfectly acceptable in terms of performance) Firefox 3 scrolls slowly and is quite jittery redrawing the screen with significant errors, overruns, and dropped packets on the network. 
>
> I had hoped that the faster page rendering in Firefox 3.5 would help but the change is not enough to make up for the performance drop on the clients. I still use FF but use Opera for anything other than sites that are mainly text. 
>   

Try out Konqueror and see how that goes.  I've used that for years in 
LTSP environments, and it's snappy enough for me.

--TP