[techtalk] netscape woes

Erin Clarke blue at web.net
Tue Nov 9 18:13:36 EST 1999


Running RH6.0 on P166 64MB RAM, KDE, NSBrowser using ~23mb, NSMail&News
using ~16mb (after a recent reboot, this will increase over the next
week...)

I've been using Netscape 4.6 (yes, yes, I should update it) w KDE (yes,
yes, its not GPL, I know, I thought I'd try it anyway, reverting to
GNOME sometime in the not-too-distant future) and, indeed, I have
noticed memory leakage that seems resolved only upon rebooting (which
ends up happening about once/week), since merely closing Netscape
doesn't always free up the memory its been using and eventually
acheiving major-kludge status. I learned early on not to leave it
running any longer than necessary. [=^J  

I keep the KDE Task Manager (ktop) running to watch the memory usage
over time, originally hoping to glean some insight towards a solution...
At first I thought it was just Netscape, then I thought perhaps it was
Netscape and KDE ...apparently 4.7 doesn't seem to address this problem,
according to what Shahla posted... Not sure what to do, other than use
Mutt and tin *all* the time for mail and news. 

I did D/L and install Star Office, which is pretty good for mail and
news, but I don't like having an even more mammoth all-in-one program
open for using only a couple of its applications. I D/L'd Corel's
WordPerfect to try a pared-down word-processor (the free D/L is pared
down) that doesn't also try to be your mail-news-reader/browser... but I
haven't installed it yet, priorities being what they are these days...
but I digress... ;^)

Well, this isn't a useful post, but it confirms that Netscape seems to
be more the culprit of memory leakage than GNOME or KDE...? Back to the
work I'm avoiding (reports... bleagh!)

Erin  8) 

TheCoder wrote: 
> Leave netscape running for a few days.  Not even doing anything and
> watch the mem usage.  Its got memory leaks.  sometimes bad.  The only
> way around this (AFAIK) is to stop it periodically.
> 
> I am hoping the linux port of Opera comes out soon.  Mozilla just isnt
> quite there yet...
> 
> Shahla Bright wrote:
> 
> > I'm using Rh 6.0 with Gnome/Enlightenment on an i686
> > with 130 megs of RAM. I need multiple browser windows
> > open most of the day, and I'm using Navigator 4.7 with
> > strong encryption. I've disabled Java. most of the
> > sites I use are fairly barebones, and I don't load
> > images until I need them, but it's still a constant
> > hair-puller. Periodically I'll hear the rumble of
> > frantic disk access, the entire GUI will switch to
> > geological time, and I'll have to switch machines,
> > telnet in, kill all my netscape processes remotely,
> > and start over. It's getting ridiculous.
> >
> > Can anyone suggest advice or diagnostic tricks? Should
> > I ditch Gnome/Enlightenment? Go back to an older
> > Netscape?

--
Erin Clarke <blue at web.net>
Web Networks Systems Administration
http://community.web.net

************
techtalk at linuxchix.org   http://www.linuxchix.org




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