[dev] Some additional observations about surf

1. In gmail, I frequently get "Experiencing technical difficulties ....",
"Error #500 .... retrying in n secs", etc. It doesn't recover from this by
itself. Sometimes refreshing the gmail page helps to restore things to
proper order. If, when this happens, I start another browser (chromium or
firefox) there is no indication that gmail is experiencing difficulties.
2. I usually run chromium on my Slackware 13.1 system. When I start
chromium, it comes up with 5 tabs, including the NY Times site. Since I
began experimenting with surf, I have a little script that brings up the
same 5 sites in surf running under tabbed. Running top, I noticed that one
of the surf processes had unusually high cpu utilization (19%; this is on a
little mini itx box I built recently, with a dual-core Atom D510, so the
processors are slow and thus cpu utilizations are higher than they would be
on a higher performance processor). Doing the same thing with chromium, the
quiescent utilizations were all low, in the low single digits. With all 5
instances of surf running, I began eliminating them with top running, to see
which one was producing the 19% utilization. It was the NY Times site.

Because of the gmail problems, I've reverted to running chromium. I will try
surf again from time to time as it progresses, and if I can help with the
debugging, I'm happy to do so.

/Don
Received on Mon Jun 21 2010 - 16:59:47 UTC