[SPARCbook] Display problem with Netscape 4.73 under Solaris 2.6

[Hugo.van.der.Kooij at caiw.nl]

On Fri, 2 Jun 2000, Rainer Canavan wrote:

> > On Fri, 2 Jun 2000, Ken Hansen wrote:
> > 
> > > Hello,
> > >     I have installed Netscape Communicator 4.73 on my SPARCBook 3GX
> > >     running 
> > > Solaris 2.6, but I am having a problem - when I call up a web site, the
> > > initial screen appears fine, but if I scroll down, the display is
> > > jumbled. 
> > >     By jumbled I mean, for example, the lines of text that were
> > >     previously covered up 
> > > are now displaying a few times in succession,and sometimes over other
> > > lines. It is as if the CPU/display can not keep up with the scroll
> > > request and just tries it's best to "throw up" what it can.
> > > 
> > >     There must be a usable version on Netscape around for SPARC/Solaris,
> > >     does 
> > > anyone have any suggestions?
> > 
> > Ity seems that netscape 4.73 does have this behaviour if it is short on
> > memory. It does this on W95 as well if memory runs short.
> 
> I don't think so. This would have to be RAM then, because I have 256MB of
> swap on top of the 64MB RAM, and believe me, there's plenty left even after
> I start Netscape. The same does not happen with Solaris 2.5.1 with _much_
> less swap (same Netscape 4.73, runs rock solid on 2.5.1). I only tried 
> with 32 bpp so far, because with 16bpp the X server seems to be pretty
> unstable.

It's the RAM limit. Somehow netscape expets memory to be fast. Solaris
2.5.1 requires less RAM compared to 2.6 and the problem is most
significant when using a page with large images (I had 6 600x400 images on
a webpage and scrolling was a pain and the disk usage (swapping) was
evidential.

Netscape seems to handle images very inefficiently. And with 800x600 @
32bit you use up almost all VidRAM so X isn't very efficient either.

Hugo.

-- 
Hugo van der Kooij; Oranje Nassaustraat 16; 3155 VJ  Maasland
hvdkooij at caiw.nl	http://home.kabelfoon.nl/~hvdkooij/
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