Tom worked on a patch quietly since I started this thread - and I’ve tested it - and it works.
My storage node at home that I tested on is an old Pentium 4 with an IDE drive in it - so it’s very slow.
Results at home:
I could open 12 pages and let them sit on the fog dashboard - CPU usage on the storage node stayed below 4, there weren’t uncontrollable httpd processes spawning, Open files by the apache user stayed below 4k - and the bandwidth chart not only reported - but it’s now reporting more smoothly than ever, is actually accurate now, and doesn’t have spells of mental disability anymore. It’s like butter.
The issue, as it was explained to me, is that the JS which renders the bandwidth chart and does the polling of bandwidth.php on all nodes enabled for bandwidth reporting - it wasn’t waiting for a response, it would just re-issue another poll before the response was received. The more dashboards open, the worse it got, until eventually apache was unable to do anything do to it’s tremendous load of ‘stacked’ processes that were back-logged. I didn’t tell anyone but Tom - but this (now solved) issue would break imaging at remote locations, too - because we use the location plugin and apache on the remote nodes is relied upon to get imaging done in this setup. That too is solved now.
These fixes will all be in RC-9.