[K12OSN] More feedback on Fedora 10 + LTSP

[Warren Togami]

On 04/28/2009 10:11 PM, James P. Kinney III wrote:
> David,
>
> As wonderful as tuxmath is (it's a great game/tool) is has a design
> problem that makes it unsuitable for LTSP. The screen draw rate is
> clocked by wait cycles as dummy loops. The system literally polls "is it
> time to send a screen update now". While the load is minimal, it pushes
> the next cycle onto a timer. So the system get dog slow and the load is
> not high yet the client end is uselessly slow. The loop timer is
> calculated once at startup and can't change as the load the goes up.
>
> The _entire_ game loop depends on this timing cycle. The heavier the
> server load the more out of sync this clocking becomes. Short of a
> rewrite I was never able to do more than a few tweaks to it. Because of
> the way multicore systems handle thread swaps, tuxmath actually makes a
> killer test on cpu efficiency.

This is an accurate assessment.  Tuxmath and tuxtype are unusable for 
LTSP.  It is just poorly designed.  It could possibly be fixed by a 
programmer who understands this stuff.

Warren