[K12OSN] Thin Client

[Shawn Powers]

Jim Kronebusch wrote:
> 60 or 70 terminals from 1 K12LTSP server this summer.  I am
> a little nervous about performance.  Usually I will have 40 concurrent
> connections but it will be very possible to have all terminals connected
> at once.  My guess is most use will be OpenOffice and Firefox.  I have a
> Dual 3.2GB Xeon box with 1.2TB of striped SATA drives and 4GB of RAM and
> a GB NIC.

Jim,

I was running an almost similar setup, except that I had SCSI-320 Raid5 
drives, and /home was mounted via nfs.

I had about 115 clients booting from it, probably around 70-80 in use 
during the day.  I was VERY worried about performance, so I used a 
spartan icewm manager without nautilus.  (Nautilus could be launched to 
browse files, it with the --no-desktop flag, or whatever that flag is...)

The performance was VERY good.  I especially noticed that openoffice 
opened instantly (well, 2-3 seconds)  and didn't have a problem with 
firefox either.

I understand your paranoia -- I felt the same way, and even had 2 more 
servers on hand when the load was too great.  I *never* used the other 2 
servers all year (I know, waste of servers -- but I had them running 
seti-at-home, so they got a workout. :)

This year, I'm going to put all 3 into play, and try using nautilus as 
to supply desktop icons.  We'll see how it goes.

Good luck,
-Shawn

-- 
Shawn Powers
Technology Director
Inland Lakes Schools
PHN: 231-238-6868 x9174
FAX: 509-356-7024
spowers at inlandlakes.org
http://techcorner.inlandlakes.org

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