Firefox 3, Leakish And CPU Heavy?

We are still using Firefox 2.0 organizationally and it's very stable. We still have some sites that are not certified for 3.X, which I am monitoring closely. Like any forward thinking Admin, I have been running 3.0 and the 3.1 betas. I have found them to render faster, and they seem to scroll faster; however it seems to have come at great expense. CPU and memory usage is substantially higher. Can anyone else confirm this? I remember there was great debate concerning file handles and sqlite databases. Are these issues resolved? Right now, Firefox seems like it will be hard for me to scale to hundreds of people.

Here is a snapshot of my session on the server, with moderate usage for a few hours:

Webcals, Summit & Remote Evolution

Things around here have been busy. I have been QAing and testing Evolution 2.24 and its interaction with Groupwise heavily. We are nearly to a milestone where I can increase the pilot/beta and add more people. I also have been installing a MoinMoin Wiki instance for use by City employees. Right now IT is testing it and trying to create some work flow suggestions, and it looks excellent. I will be devoting an entire blog entry to our goals and ideas.

Intranet Webcals

Our internal use of Webcal files has exploded over the last few years, so I have been writing a new GUI to make it easier for users to add sources to Evolution. We have a lot of information stored in databases that is appropriate for people to view on their calendars. Examples of this are employee birthdays, hire dates, anniversaries and so on. So we create .ics files of this type of information and drop it into an internal web server. That makes them available for all employees. Evolution has the ability to add webcals from the command line, so the GUI passes the webcal:// on the command line and it appears right inside their running Evolution session. All they have to do is pick a calendar color. The current state of the GUI is below:



Summit 2009

I have gotten approval to announce the availability of our facility to conduct the 2009 Summit on our premises if there is interest. I know that Boston is the tradition, so I'm just making a humble offer that it can be held at our location if you wish. We have a building that is used for training and emergency operations, and we could conduct the hacking in that facility. The one thing that we could offer is real GNOME users for focus groups and study of new features. We are a short drive from the Tampa (TPA) airport on the Gulf of Mexico. Hit me up on the IRC if this seems like a fit for the community.

Remote Evolution & Miguel

Miguel posted a blog about wanting to gain access to his Evolution while traveling. That exact product existed, was purchased and buried by SCO and now is owned by Sun. Tarantella let us run Xwindows applications 10 years ago, and was one of those great ideas that came out at the wrong time. During that period, people were still excited about client/server computing and how many Ghz you had at your desktop to care about centralizing applications. We ran Tarantella on SCO and Linux and it worked *great* for us. All you did was lay it down in your Apache web server, and point it to your applications and they immediately worked in a browser. In the pre-Evolution-1.0 days I even ran Evolution in this manner. You would log in from any browser, and it started a Java applet, and you would see the gray/white X checker boxes for a split second and your X application would immediately open. No plugins to add to the browser, no client side software. I found this old picture describing how it worked. It's too bad these types of products haven't become more commonplace.

Not So Pleasant

Is it just me or does used bubblegum sound not so pleasant (shot below)? :)