On Thursday, 28 October 2004 14:19, Ken Cobler wrote: > Liam Marshall wrote: > > I have upgraded as far as I can go for this year. Performance is > > acceptable, except that more than 2 instances of thin clients running > > tux type or tux math bogs entire system down. Everything else > > functions well. Staroffice and FireFox running simultaneously on 25+ > > machines doing research essays perform well enough for our school's > > needs. > > I've been looking very hard at the tuxtype2 sources after experiencing the same problem. The problem is that they don't use multithreading. Event handling is done inside a control loop. This means that all events have to be polled on every run of the loop, and the loop has to run fast in order for the rest of the program (all that stuff the goes on, on the screen) to occur.
The result is a massive hardware-interrupt flood as you go to multiple users, and far more X11 network traffic than the graphics need. On a single user fat client, this would never be noticed, which is why the developers did it this way. I picked this up because I had made the exact same mistake in kwikpanel a year ago. In that case it was easy, nothing in kwikpanel is supposed to happen unless the user does something anyway, so just freeze-frame it until an event occur. This does not work in tuxtype - because the fishes need to fall one more line regardless of whether you typed/moved the mouse. The only way to fix it there (that I can see) is multithreading the app and putting event management in a seperate thread. That is a massive ammount of work and very hard to debug. I'm still planning to do it, because it's a really usefull app, but only after OpenLab 3.2 is out the door. Once I have a stable version, I'll contribute it back to the tuxtype project. Basically these changes are needed specifically for thin-client environments - for two reasons. 1) You are suddenly faced with multiple simultaneous copies. 2) You need to keep network traffic low. I'll keep the list posted. -- A.J Venter Lead Developer, DireqLearn 082 726 5103 http://www.direqlearn.org http://www.direqlearn.org/olce http://silentcoder.co.za ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by: Sybase ASE Linux Express Edition - download now for FREE LinuxWorld Reader's Choice Award Winner for best database on Linux. http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=5588&alloc_id=12065&op=click _____________________________________________________________________ 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
