On a terminal server, are the values for the following two Firefox user preferences per user or per terminal server?
- network.http.max-connections-per-server (15 is the default value)
- network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server (6 is the default value)
Background: We have a Microsoft Server 2003 R2 Terminal Server Sun X6250 blade with performance issues relating to Firefox and Google Apps email. The blade has 8 cores and 32GB of RAM. We have approximately 30 active users. Everyone uses Google Apps Enterprise Edition web based email. Once or twice a week the server CPU utilization will approach 100%. The Task Manager process list sorted by descending CPU utilization shows almost all firefox.exe processes at the top. Some of the Firefox processes are constantly consuming 5 to 9% of CPU utilization. When the user closes the Google Apps email tab the CPU utilization drops down to 0 and then it consumes an occasional percent or two. We don't see this behavior when using Internet Explorer 7. Most users want to user Firefox rather than IE.
My theory: Google Apps Email is an AJAX application that uses persistent connections. Firefox is looping when Google Apps Email is requesting the seventh persistent connection to the same Google server. Of course this theory is invalid if the user preference network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server is per user and not as I suspect per terminal server.