melonman's Journal: Why do my browsers keep dying?

Good day in the cybercafe. All ten ltsp terminals at work, including 2 copies of Star Office and 4 java chat sessions. 85% CPU usage. Whatever that means, but the result was that everything was slooooow. Maybe I'll see if Father Xmas can get me a new CPU.

Rather less sanguine about the fact that java chat sessions are so flakey. I really don't get it, as

• Some days everything works fine, other days the sessions fall over every 32 minutes
• Sites seem to go through phases of not working. Yahoo went through a not working phase for a week a while back, fine now. Caramail is the most popular, and the most random
• In the case of Caramail (very popular French site, only works with NS4), I can have one user for whom it works like a dream sitting next to another user for whom it won't work at all, or freezes every 4 mouseclicks.

The customers have all sorts of theories about which machines work the best, but since they disagree about which machines to go for I'm not convinced. Our one disked terminal does seem better, sometimes. It's not the famous mozilla flash problem: fixed it with crossover plugins. Seems to get worse when the machine is busier, or is the machine busy because of all the dead and decaying java?

Still, I guess life would be dull if our computers were as deterministic as they are supposed to be...