I'm brand new to the LTSP world, and a search of this list failed to provide any performance information on a LTS station versus "real" X-terminals. Here I provide some numbers, using x11perf and Xmark. There was a thread in this group about "Slow-Motion Benchmarking" but I didn't find any actual results.
I compared three platforms. 1. The LTS station: Pentium 133MHz, 64 Meg RAM, ATI 2 Meg RAM video card with a Mach64 CT chipset. Xmark = 3.6124 2. NCD MCX X-terminal: 4.0 Megs code memory, 8.0 Megs data memory. Xmark = 1.6621 3. NCD Explora 450 X-terminal: 8.0 Megs code memory. These are my best terminals. Xmark = 4.0188 We all know that benchmarks provide a very imperfect measure of real-world performance. However, these numbers do roughly correspond to the way these units "feel" doing the things my users usually do: Netscape, Mathematica, etc. If anything the gap between the LTS station and the MCX terminals is subjectively larger than the numbers indicate. The machine these were connected to is sort of irrelevant for these tests, but in case you want to know it is a Dell 6300 with dual Xeon processors, 1 Gig of RAM, a nearly plain vanilla Red Hat 7.1 GNU/Linux, 100BaseT network. Also in case you want to know, we serve about 1500 undergraduate Physics students at the University of Toronto. I have about 30 X-terminals on my subnet, some of which are over 10 years old. (Anybody remember the 17c? We're still using them.) They are falling apart faster than we can fix them. So being able to use ancient old PCs to replace them and get a performance boost at the same time has made me a very happy camper. Thanks to those who have done all the work on the LTSP. -- David
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