Firefox 3
Dear all,
We have been experiencing this for a lot of time now.
Today we did an experiment: Kill Firefox on all Macs.
The load suddenly went down to 4-5% on AppleFileServer with 40 Users.
Check if your users are using Firefox 3. People on other platforms are getting the same behaviour: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=441481
I instructed all my users to use Safari for the moment. For 10 hours, the load on the server has been fine and everything works as it should.
I hope this solves it for you, because for us, it’s been a nightmare…
The problem here lies on how Firefox currently handles the urlclassifier3.sqlite and other sqlite files. It seems that it perform some badass filelocking that consequently leads to a thread shortage, that makes less threads available to serve, which, we think, leads to a penalty on accesing the disk. Also, that file is being updated continuously by google servers in an incremental way.
A simple fs_usage AppleFileServer will show you quite some access to that file. Please note that even only 4 users running firefox makes our 4 cores go 100% and our clients to beachball.
One comment: Apple Premium Service and Support hasn’t been any helpful for us. We had to discover the problem the hard way.