[K12OSN] 8 Minutes to Open Open Office 2

[Les Mikesell]

On Thu, 2005-09-29 at 16:43, R. Scott Belford wrote:

> Our vision is to enable schools to utilize free software in a thin-client 
> environment and to do it in a self-sustaining, student-involving manner.  
> When the end user witnesses a degradation in performance from an upgrade, 
> they blame the upgrade and lose confidence in the product.  Fortunately, I am 
> not the end user.

I think, based on looking back at your servers specs and what others
have said about performance, that you have some unusual problem.  But
on a general note, the 4.4.1 release is based on Fedora FC4 which is
a distribution aimed at pushing out very new code with all of the
tradeoffs that implies.  A surprise here and there is not unusual. If
you aren't comfortable with that or you are recommending this for
people who aren't prepared for surprises, a more conservative choice
would the the 4.2.1EL released based on Centos4.  Your OO will be older
but the kernel / device drivers will be much better tested.

And back to basics: have you run 'yum update' recently or is this
straight off the CD's?  Also was this done as an upgrade from
the earlier version or a fresh install?

> > 1) Have you run prelink?
> 
> I will have this done.  However, if it was never needed with 4.2.1, why do we 
> need to ask a teacher to do this?

It shouldn't be necessary, but that might be the problem.

> > 2) Have you looked in dmesg for error messages about network problems?
> 
> Doubtful that any network issues exist given the prior performance of the 
> hardware.

Remember that all of your drivers are different.  And since your
performance seems much worse than others this could be the problem.


> > 3) What is the network backbone of your system? [Switch, hub, gigabit,
> > 10mbit, etc?] OOfice is a large app with a lot of window touching...
> > network mismatches between the server or clients and switch can show
> > up on this and not other apps.
> 
> Gig uplink to a gig switch.  I don't see this as an issue.

A duplex mismatch is a killer.  mii-tool or ethtool will show the
Linux side.  If the switch is managed you can see that as well.  If
it isn't, there may be status lights.  You want full duplex and the
gig speed at both sides. 

> I am intrigued by Les' suggestion that /home be on a separate drive array.  It 
> does not explain why the problem exists with 4.4.1, but perhaps it is design 
> function of OO version 2.

That was before I saw you had 4 gigs ram/scsi drives.  Head contention
is still an issue but I think you have some other problem. 

> > 4) What does top/ps say?
> 
> I am asking a school to do this for us.  Asking an overworked teacher, though, 
> to coordinate this while managing 30 students is, well, overwhelming.  We 
> will likely have to get a volunteer on site for this.

Can you ssh into the box yourself?

-- 
  Les Mikesell
    les at futuresource.com