Browse page with full-sized images crashes Browse and Firefox, it seems partly a wiki.laptop.org issue

[S Page]

or "Browse no browse Browse" :-)

Visit http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Browse in either Browse or Firefox on
8.2.1 and your laptop will lock up and minutes later Browse will die.
This is mentioned in comments on http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/8278 and
http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/8719

If you use Firefox's Tools > Page Info > Media and scroll through the
list of images, you see that the page has dozens of full-sized
screenshots, all around 1,200 x 900 px, that the browser scales to
tiny thumbnails according to the img tag's width and height.

But that's not how Mediawiki is supposed to work.  If a page on
wikipedia.org calls for a thumbnail of a large image, it contains a
reference to a pre-shrunk image rather than the original full-size
image. E.g.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Vista#End-user_features has a
thumbnail of a screenshot.  So the image it references is
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/f/f0/Windows_Explorer_Vista.png/180px-Windows_Explorer_Vista.png
which is 180px wide, rather than the full-size original
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/f0/Windows_Explorer_Vista.png

Somehow wiki.laptop.org doesn't create thumbnails, it seems to only
refer to the originals.  I reopened bug 8278 and e-mail this to OLPC
sysadmin.  http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Image_Administration#Image_thumbnailing
has the configuration instructions.

Could this thumbnail problem be related to the wiki.laptop.org's
ImageMagick failures on the large SVGs
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Image:Olpc-deployments-20090515.svg ?


The XO should be able to deal with complex image-heavy pages on the
web better.  I guess it's allocating memory close to a limit, then
OLPC's bad out-of-memory behavior kicks in.  Why can't the O.S. kill
Browse faster instead of locking up for minutes?
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap/Memory_pressure references
previous e-mail threads on this subject.

Cheers,
--
=S Page