Firefox slowdown during big IO ops

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: Peter <plpeter2006-/E1597aS9LQAvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org>

| It is customary to lower the scheduling priority of the large IO processes and
| in general of all heavy background tasks.

What priority do you mean?  Usually scheduling is about CPU
allocation.  Heavy I/O processes are usually waiting for I/O and thus
don't use that much CPU and thus normally get high CPU priority from
the traditional schedulers.

Some schedulers do worry about "working set" and try to swap out
processes that cannot be allocated enough real memory to avoid
thrashing but I think that that is a separate issue.

Some systems try to deduce which processes are interactive and give
them higher priority on the assumption that users will notice.
Stories of gaming such schedulers go back to at least the late 1960s.

My theory of FireFox is that it is a monster program with really bad
performance pathologies.  It eats unbelieveable amounts of memory and
CPU when used the way I do: long sessions with lots of windows and
tabs.  The obvious solutions are: switch browsers or fix FireFox.
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