[K12OSN] Stress Test

[Daniel Bodanske <danielbo clickta com>]

I know this will bore just about everyone here, but I am so excited.  I stress 
tested my K12 system for the first time today.  My "server" is a 500MHz PII 
with 256Mb RAM and IDE.  I haven't had any problems in my language center 
yet, but we aren't really open full tilt, either.  I wanted to find out how 
far this machine would take us (we need a budget approval to change 
machines), and since I don't have our star multimedia language application 
working under RH yet, I had to simulate the load.
If anyone has read this far, I'm looking for opinions on whether my method is 
valid.  I logged in on the server in Gnome and ran top.  I booted, logged in 
in Gnome and ram xmms on each workstation in turn.  The MP3s were about 2-3 
seconds each sampled at 44k, randomly and continuously played in a loop.  I 
set the screensavers to random as well.  I got to about 14 workstations this 
way begore I noticed any problems, when the DHCP started not booting the 
clients sometimes or freezing on log-in.  I eventually made it to 22 
workstations with a load average hovering around 25-27 and left it there for 
about 2 hours.  I heard no problems with the audio, but the screensavers 
slowed quite a bit.  
Again, I'm not looking for anything truly scientific here, but does this seem 
like a reasonable test of whether this MM app is likely to work?  Except for 
my headache after the whole thing, I was totally blown away by the 
performance of this little machine.
Dan