Comment 21 for bug 111299

Well I successfully built the granparadiso package with the suggested patch applied. Performance improved but pixmap cache was still allowed to spike and cause thin clients to freeze, but less often. Gavin McCullagh then suggested trying to tweak this section of the patch to decrease the amount of time the pixmaps are cached even further:

+static int
+get_discard_timer_ms (void)
+{
+ /* FIXME: don't hardcode this */
+ return 5000; /* 5 seconds */
+}

I went to the extreme side and reduced this to .2 seconds (return 200). Now every site that would have crashed the client in the past...did not. Cool. However performance of said sites went to horrible. But extremely slow loading of the offending sites is way better than hard freezes. Possible increase to 1 second cache may help. But the other 95% of average browsing seems to take no performance it at all and work quite nicely.

However non-gecko based browsers such as Opera and Konqueror do not seem to cache pixmaps in this fashion at all, and are still able to load the offending sites with no performance hit at all. I have no idea how this is done, but if Firefox could incorporate such methods this would be a much better fix.

Are the portions of the patch that reduce the amount of time pixmaps remain in system memory able to be patched into current releases such as 2.0.0.6? It looks like it will be some time until FF 3 is released and the ability to build a current release with this portion of the patch could solve a lot of headaches in the thin client world until FF 3 is released. If this is possible please let me know.

Federico, thanks for your work on this.

For others following this thread here is the method I was able to use on Ubuntu with success to build the patch into Firefox (from Gavin McCullagh):

1. Add gutsy source line to /etc/apt/sources.list if they do not already exist
     deb-src http://ie.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ gutsy main restricted universe multiverse
2. sudo apt-get build-dep firefox-granparadiso
3. apt-get source firefox-granparadiso
4. cd firefox-granparadiso-3.0~alpha7
a. cd debian/patches/
b. wget http://primates.ximian.com/~federico/misc/moz-images-20070907.diff
c. edit moz-images-20070907.diff if desired to increase/decrease discard timer
d. echo "moz-images-20070907.diff" >> series
e. cd ../../
5. debuild -uc -us
6. Remove the source

Jim