I would see where the bottlenecks are before I would throw various hardware at the problem. There are a few things to monitor while the students are doing desktop publishing work. First, since desktop publishing is very graphical, I would look at your bandwith usage. Install MRTG or some other software and monitor your switches (if managed) and your server bandwith. Also, open up the system monitor tool in gnome (or top if you are a teminal guy), and look at the cpu usage, memory usage and swap useage. This will tell you if you need more processing power or memory. I never really played arround with scribus but if it accesses the disk alot, I would look into getting a RAID setup instead of going for SCSI drives. Chris
----- Original Message ---- From: Krsnendu Dasa <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: ltsp-discuss@lists.sourceforge.net Sent: Wednesday, January 25, 2006 12:50:28 AM Subject: [Ltsp-discuss] Cheapest and best way to expand LTSP network The number of client computers connected to our K12LTSP network keeps increasing. It is currently 14 clients soon to increase to 20 or more with the addition of a new classroom. Most clients are very similar Compaq Deskpro DPENS P2 or Celeron 350 or 400MHz. Our current server hardware is AMD 2500XP Desktop, 2GB RAM, 160GB SATA HD, GigaLAN Each of the 3 (soon to be 4) classrooms has their own 10/100 switch that feeds into a 100/1000bit switch that connects to the server. All are unmanaged switches. There are also a few windows computers that connect to the system and authenticate against the K12LTSP server using SMBLDAP. The K12LTSP server also acts as a file server for the windows computers. During a newspaper production project, when we had more than ten clients running simultaneously using Scribus and OpenOffice or Firefox, things slowed down a bit and we had a few crashes. Increasing RAM from 1 GB to 2 GB seemed to help somewhat but not completely. I am thinking that I will have to upgrade the system somehow to accomodate the new clients, and generally to be able to deal with higher peak usage. Below are some options I have thought of. Which would be the best option? Any other suggestions? 1.Upgrade from a "desktop" computer to a server specific motherboard/CPU including SCSI drives etc. This seems expensive, and I am not sure of the real benefit of a "server" over "desktop" at the same CPU speed etc. 2.Add another similar desktop box and use load balancing as explained in WIKI. 3.Add another similar desktop box and use it as an application server for openoffice/ firefox etc. 4. Enable local applications for firefox and openoffice. Could also be a solution for sound problems (Mplayer) too. 5.??? What is your advice? Thanks. Krsnendu dasa ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Splunk Inc. Do you grep through log files for problems? Stop! Download the new AJAX search engine that makes searching your log files as easy as surfing the web. DOWNLOAD SPLUNK! http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnk&kid=103432&bid=230486&dat=121642 _____________________________________________________________________ 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 ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Splunk Inc. Do you grep through log files for problems? Stop! Download the new AJAX search engine that makes searching your log files as easy as surfing the web. DOWNLOAD SPLUNK! http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnk&kid=103432&bid=230486&dat=121642 _____________________________________________________________________ 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
