You're using most of your swap.  Note below the Xorg server is 3.1G resident; that's big (and something's leaking), log out and log back in to free it up.  plugin-container is obviously an issue too.  I've had firefox open since Nov8 (6 days), with some views to Flash sites/youtube, and I'm about 1.6G VIRT, 687MB RES.   So while your firefox size isn't small, it's not unreasonable either.

On 11/14/2012 06:24 PM, Yasha Karant wrote:
> On 11/13/2012 01:05 PM, Connie Sieh wrote:
>> On Tue, 13 Nov 2012, Yasha Karant wrote:
>>
>>> Right now, my quad core SL 6x X86-64 workstation is not responding very
>>> well; a quick look at top reveals:
>>>
>>> Tasks: 181 total,   2 running, 178 sleeping,   0 stopped,   1 zombie
>>> Cpu(s): 41.1%us,  7.2%sy,  0.0%ni, 51.3%id,  0.4%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.0%si,
>>> 0.0%st
>>> Mem:   8196468k total,  8002116k used,   194352k free,     9344k buffers
>>> Swap:  2048252k total,  1753152k used,   295100k free,   543572k cached
>>>
>>>    PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
>>>
>>>   3417 ykarant   20   0 1679m 738m 8752 S 122.2  9.2   9239:30
>>> plugin-containe
>>>   3342 ykarant   20   0 2995m 2.2g  18m R 94.9 28.2   8309:43 firefox
>>>
>>>   2051 root      20   0 4448m 3.1g 9440 S  1.8 39.6 443:40.39 Xorg
>>>
>>>   2793 ykarant    9 -11  559m 3028 1860 S  1.8  0.0  20:04.64 pulseaudio
>>>
>>>   3113 ykarant   20   0  321m 6904 5292 S  1.8  0.1 211:10.01 gkrellm

>>>
>>> My institution requires the use of Adobe flash (as well as java), and
>>> thus it seems that plugin-container is being used.  Is there an
>>> alternative approach?  The above seems to me a total waste of machine
>>> resources.
>
> When there are security upgrades/fixes from the originating application
> provider (e.g., Mozilla, Adobe, etc.), the Security Office at my
> university requires us to use the latest production version of the
> application.  If SL can establish in a document (e.g., a URL) that the
> SL distribution version meets these same security issues, and can do so
> each time the originating provider releases a new production version
> (major or minor release), then I can use the version from SL.


If you keep up with your Linux updates, you should be current and meet their requirements.  RHEL ships firefox ESR.  Google it. :-)  You'll find references to:

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/

https://www.mozilla.org/security/known-vulnerabilities/firefoxESR.html

Compare latest vulnerabilities to 'rpm -q firefox'.


> Note that I use the internal upgrade/update mechanism within firefox;
> that is, I su to root, as root invoke firefox from a terminal
> application, and then within firefox the upgrade proceeds, sometimes as
> a partial update, sometimes (when the partial update fails), firefox
> initiates a full update download.  But, I do not myself download any
> tar.gz/tar.bz, .rpm, or other files.

Where is this replacement firefox stored, in /usr/bin/?  For people that absolutely need the latest version, I suggest they download and install (from mozilla.org) into a subdir in their home directory AS THEM (not root) so the update mechanism will "just work" on-demand, as the developers intended.

Hope that helps.