[K12OSN] Server sizing in the real world

Terrell Prudé, Jr. microman at cmosnetworks.com
Thu Oct 13 00:14:46 UTC 2005


Concur, mostly.  Until just over a month ago, I had a system in place
serving 25 terminals.  It was found out, after two years of trouble-free
operation, and ripped out for "not being Windows."  It worked very well
for that load and had some room to spare; the last K12LTSP version that
it ran was 4.2.1, which I find that I like a lot, even though 4.4.1 is
out.  Here were the specs of that server.

Twin AMD Athlon 1.47GHz chips
4GB DRAM
Two 80GB parallel IDE disk drives (started with just one)
Gig-E fiber NIC

You'll notice that I used parallel IDE disk drives, while Petre
recommends SCSI disks.  He's right; SCSI is certainly better than any
form of ATA.  However, it does cost more to implement.  When the above
server was built, we were in a tight-budget situation and thus went with
parallel IDE so that we could build the server at all (I just flat
refused to do it without 4GB DRAM).  The server not only served 25 LTSP
terminals, but also acted as a major "Windows" file server for the
school, thanks to Samba.  It handled everything thrown at it with
aplomb.

--TP

On Wed, 2005-10-12 at 14:52 -0500, Petre Scheie wrote:

> Quick & dirty reply: For 35-50 users I'd get a dual-CPU box with 4GB RAM and a pair of 
> SCSI disks, at least 36GB, 72GB if you can afford it.  Get gigabit NICs for the server 
> and make sure your switch has gigabit ports for the server (the clients will be fine 
> with 100Mb ports).  That should be enough to cover you for a while.  As you add more 
> clients over time, you can look into getting another server and splitting the load, or 
> using dedicated application servers for heavy apps like OOo.
> 
> Petre
> 
> Barry Solof wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > The school has changed plans (again!).
> > 
> > We were going to start with an old server and a few K12ltsp terminals in 
> > a few classrooms to see how things worked out.  Now the school wants to 
> > use the K12ltsp for a dedicated computer classroom with about 20 
> > terminals.  My guess is they will want to run other terminals in other 
> > classrooms off of this server eventually.
> > 
> > They have found some money for a good server.   That makes it a lot 
> > easer cause the old server isn't really working well.
> > 
> > The hardware wiki talks about needing 250 meg for the server and 50 meg 
> > (or more) per terminal.  Is this really enough for Gnome/OpenOffice/Tux 
> > type/Tux math/etc.?  What sort of experiences have you had with the 
> > number of terminals per server?
> > 
> > Bottom line: can a single server handle 35-50 clients?  How much memory 
> > and hard drive would be enough?
> > 
> > Many thanks,
> > Barry
> > 
> > 
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> 
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