for galeon & mozilla people: a bug report
for slashdot people: maybe you should change the offending HTML code
until mozilla is fixed.
when viewing http://slashdot.org/, galeon renders the page correctly but
continuously reloads an image called "greendot.gif" until you hit ESC or
click the Stop button. note that it only seems to happen if you click
the reload button, the initial page view is fine.
mozilla has had exactly the same problem since at least M16 (that's when
i first noticed it, but that's also when i first started using mozilla
as a real alternative to netscape).
in the galeon or mozilla window, the greendot.gif image flickers on and
off several times per second.
the HTML that causes this seems innocuous. the only slightly unusual
thing they're doing is setting WIDTH="80%" in the IMG SRC tag, so i
would guess that it is what triggers the problem. i don't know why they
don't just use a <HR> tag.
<img src="http://images.slashdot.org/greendot.gif" alt="" width="80%" height="1"
hspace="10" vspace="30">
i have cut and pasted this IMG SRC line into another web page, with
exactly the same results...this test was to determine whether it was the
IMG SRC line itself, or something weird with the TABLE it was embedded
in on the slashdot page.
it's not just redrawing the image, it's re-fetching it every time.
see the excerpt from my squid proxy log below for evidence. note that
this is only a few seconds worth, but it still amounted to 45K of log
entries.
the real problem is that if you happen to do a reload on slashdot and
forget to press ESC or click Stop, then you risk filling up your /var
partition with millions of these lines in /var/log/squid/access.log
this is a serious problem because running out of space on /var kills
most daemons that need to write to /var, including squid, postfix, and
others.
983061295.838 242 127.0.0.1 TCP_HIT/200 663 GET
http://images.slashdot.org/greendot.gif - NONE/- image/gif
983061295.838 242 127.0.0.1 TCP_HIT/200 663 GET
http://images.slashdot.org/greendot.gif - NONE/- image/gif
983061295.959 17 127.0.0.1 TCP_HIT/200 663 GET
http://images.slashdot.org/greendot.gif - NONE/- image/gif
[...411 lines deleted, identical except for the timestamp field...]
983061305.554 12 127.0.0.1 TCP_HIT/200 663 GET
http://images.slashdot.org/greendot.gif - NONE/- image/gif
983061305.563 8 127.0.0.1 TCP_HIT/200 663 GET
http://images.slashdot.org/greendot.gif - NONE/- image/gif
983061323.489 7 127.0.0.1 TCP_HIT/200 605 HEAD
http://images.slashdot.org/greendot.gif - NONE/- image/gif
craig
--
craig sanders <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
GnuPG Key: 1024D/CD5626F0
Key fingerprint: 9674 7EE2 4AC6 F5EF 3C57 52C3 EC32 6810 CD56 26F0
