[ok-mail] [K12OSN] Scalability (long email)

[Terrell Prude', Jr.]

That's one of the major problems with Windows Terminal Server; the 
underlying platform's just not efficient.  The RDP protocol used with it 
is reasonably efficient, but the server itself gets S-L-O-W very 
quickly.  I never did more than five on a dual-PIII, 900MHz, 1GB DRAM 
box w/ Ultra3-SCSI RAID, back when I was running Windows networks, for 
performance reasons; with any more, the CPUs kept pegging, and the 
memory subsystem kept almost continuously swapping to disk.  As it was, 
there was plenty of swapping, and the CPUs were heavily used.  We also 
had stability issues with user applications (e. g. Microsoft Office).  
We ended up using Terminal Services only for us sysadmins and making 
everyone run MS Office on their desktops again.  Boy, did we learn!

If for some reason you have to do this for twenty clients on one server, 
then I'd recommend going for, at a minimum, a four processor box, with 
max GHz (currently we're talking either Xeon 3.2GHz's or Opteron 
2.2GHz's (that's the 848 model, BTW).  Also, better have no less than 
4GB DRAM, and more is definitely not overkill.

--TP

norbert wrote:

> Ooops that's a P-III & just for clarification we're using K12LTSP with 
> diskless client, from each client we launch a rdesktop session.
>
> thks again
> norbert
>
> bear2bar at netscape.net wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> Has anyone setup rdesktop with linux on 20 + workstations ? (With 
>> Win2K) and what specs are needed for the Win2K server to handle the load.
>> We've setup a P-II 500 Mhz with 512mb ram and can barely launch 3 
>> connections. The response is incrediblly SLOW....
>>
>> thanks for the input
>>
>> norbert
>>
>> jhansknecht at hanstech.com wrote:
>>
>>>On Tue, 2004-04-06 at 21:26, Shawn Powers wrote:
>>>
>>>  
>>>
>>>>snip
>>>>I have 3 schools, all connected via fiber.  There are approx 30 classrooms per 
>>>>building, with a variation of 10 & 100mbit connections internally.  The 2 big 
>>>>directions I'm looking at would be to have 90 "mini-labs", where a teacher 
>>>>gets a new white-box Pentium 4 computer, and have it serve as a classroom 
>>>>LTSP server to 5 or 6 "junker" thin clients for the students (much like the 
>>>>original case study Paul Nelson put up several years back).  If the student 
>>>>management system won't work under Wine -- that teacher computer would have 
>>>>to run win4lin or some such solution.
>>>>    
>>>>
>>>
>>>Instead of win4lin think about using a Windows terminal server with
>>>rdesktop. ....you will need to spend a little but I suspect you will be
>>>able to conqueror this application requirement.
>>>  
>>>