Craig Ringer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said: > > > 30 - 40 would be my vague guess, limited by RAM rather than CPU. You're > dealing with a lot of memory-hungry apps, though. In particular, I find > Evolution to gobble mind-boggling amounts of memory (at least when using > IMAP). > > I have a dual Xeon 2.4GHz with 2GB of RAM here and it's happy with > twelve workstations. The CPU is essentially idle all the time - the > pressure is all on RAM. Memory use is at about fifty percent, but we run > a mail server (SpamAssassin is an incredible memory hog), web server, > and a few small databases off the box too.
There is no other special services that will run on the terminal server. Basically the setup would be for workstation purposes. Maybe the services that will definitely run on this server will be: [1] XDMCP [2] XFS [3] CUPS [4] NFS [5] DHCP [6] TFTP/Xinetd [7] SSH Maybe I forgot some of the other services that are needed for this kind of setup but definitely those are the services that I have in mind. Actually, it's easy to upgrade the RAM of the server but I admit that it's very difficult to upgrade the network/physical connections. Eventhough the IBM xSeries 345 server has a gigabit ethernet, still it can only use of up to 100Mbps because the existing NICs on the workstations and switches are all in 10/100Mbps. My next question will be: "What will be the maximum number of workstations that will fairly run on this kind of setup in terms of the current network infrastructure?" > Most of ours users use XFCE4 with Mozilla and OO.o. Three use KDE 3.3 > (size-optimised) with Evolution 1.4, OO.o and Konqueror. The biggest > memory hog is Evolution, by far. I'm hoping Evolution 2.0 solves that > problem. OO.o is next, then Mozilla. KDE is barely detectable when it > comes to memory use, as it's per user data set sizes are amazingly tiny. Well, this is on the application side issue. Maybe we can just double the RAM to 8GB for the server if that would be the case. > If you can persuade OO.o and Evo to gobble less RAM, you may well be > able to more than double my user count estimate. > > I'd strongly recommend that you set up your software environment and > about three terminals, then start profiling memory use. Look at how much > extra memory use the first, second, then third terminals coming online > causes (there should be no X server on the server for this test). The > second and third terminals should cause roughly the same jump in memory > use on the server, and the amount they've been using after they've been > running for a while is probably what you want to plan for per-terminal. Actually, I already have an LTSP setup with the following info: Server: Intel P4 2.4Ghz, 1GB RAM and 80GB 5400RPM IDE HDD Workstations: Intel Pentium 1 with 16MB and 32MB RAM Network: 10Mbps and 100Mbps No. of connected workstations for now: 20 Desktop: KDE Major Applications: OpenOffice.org, Evolution, Mozilla and the performance is acceptable enough. Now for my planned setup on IBM xSeries 345 machines, I was expecting that I would have of at least 50 workstations connected to the server but I'm not very much sure for the network performance for the 100Mbps connection. What do you think? > Remember that for optimum efficiency you'll want at least 512MB free for > a monster disk cache. If our server gets below that we start touching > the disk, and things slow down significantly. > > Of course, this is in the end just my personal opinion, and it's mostly > guesswork based off my experience running a similar system in a small > environment. Others may have been much more successful or may think my > estimates are overly optimistic. Thanks, Craig. Any other ideas, tips, opinions? Thanks in advance. --- MARVIN T. PASCUAL E-mail: mpascual AT qsr DOT com DOT ph Tel. No. +63 2 9200189 Mobile No. +63 918 4115188 Yahoo! Messenger ID: bintut GNU/Linux User No. 247127 ------------------------------------------------------- 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
