On Mon, Aug 18, 2003 at 04:47:51PM -0500, Jason Greene wrote: > We are evaluating Linux in the Company I work for. We have over 60k desktops. > > I'm on the evaluation team and I'm really pushing the LTSP idea for call > centers and the like. > > What I'd like to ask the LTSP team and all it s users is "What is the > capicity of a server?" Meaning how many users can a server haneld. > > I know it depends on hardware so if you can maybe be specific as in > lets say I had Dell Quad-Xeon 2.8Ghz with 32GB ram and enough harddisk space > for the users. How may "average" users could this server handle?
I can make some comments about linux on that sort of system. We have a Dell Quad Xeon, 1.6GHz to support about 70 LTSP style terminals, plus a bunch of assorted tasks like file/web/mail serving. It's used by a computer science department so there is lots of software development as well as office tasks and mozillas. Our system has 16GB of memory but the performance was poor due to the PAE mode of the intel processors. Interactive response was very choppy. Linux VM bugs also start to show up in these sort of systems. We now run the system using only 4GB of memory using a non "bigmem" kernel (no PAE). The system now works very well. I don't know how many more users it would be capable of supporting but it feels like there is plenty of room. If you want to look at large memory systems, you need to go to a 64bit processor. Stay away from the 32bit systems. Currently a 32GB system won't even run on a 32bit processor unless you get some very cutting edge patches from the kernel developers. 16GB 32bit systems are supported by vendors, but I suspect they are intended (and tested) for running large Oracle databases and other one big application style tasks. -- Norman Gaywood, Systems Administrator School of Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science University of New England, Armidale, NSW 2351, Australia [EMAIL PROTECTED] Phone: +61 (0)2 6773 2412 http://turing.une.edu.au/~norm Fax: +61 (0)2 6773 3312 Please avoid sending me Word or PowerPoint attachments. See http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email sponsored by: Free pre-built ASP.NET sites including Data Reports, E-commerce, Portals, and Forums are available now. Download today and enter to win an XBOX or Visual Studio .NET. http://aspnet.click-url.com/go/psa00100003ave/direct;at.aspnet_072303_01/01 _____________________________________________________________________ Ltsp-discuss mailing list. To un-subscribe, or change prefs, goto: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/ltsp-discuss For additional LTSP help, try #ltsp channel on irc.freenode.net
