On Thu, 8 Mar 2007, Frank Cox wrote: > On Thu, 08 Mar 2007 07:18:34 -0500 (EST) > "Robert G. Brown" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >> on't thank me -- we're getting a few neowares to prototype for a >> project that might involve installing 30-40 of them eventually. You're >> breaking ground for me...:-) > > Then you will also be interested to know that now that I have ltspswapd set > up, > I can use 1280x1024 at colour depth 16 on those terminals too. No problem > with > redraws or dropouts so far today at all.
I know you said some of this elsewhere in the thread, but could you summarize in a single message? Things I (and maybe others) would like to know are: Hardware layout -- DRAM capacity, CPU speed, network speed, anything else that seems relevant (monitor size/res, std keyboard or no, std mouse or no). Memory layout of the running system. It sounds like the systems are running "tight" on memory, which I'd expect for 256 MB systems but not, generally, for 512 MB systems. So how is the memory being used? Resident kernel, obviously, some list of systems tasks I presume but not occupying a lot of space. X is generally large and largely resident (as opposed to paged out). A bunch of stuff associated with e.g. your window manager, large but mostly paged out. Finally applications, ranging from 5-15 MB, but only 3-5 MB resident, except for stuff like ooffice, which on my system at least seems to be a real piggy at well over 200 MB VSZ, 70+ MB RSS when actually doing something. Something like that? Output of the free command and ps aux would (with a normal set of work tools loaded) would be very useful, as might be output of vmstat -a (assuming that it is available). Perhaps swapon -s output as well. Maybe df. I'm just trying to figure out how much thin-client memory is really required to boot up a "normal" desktop and run a few apps without a disk vs running a fair kitchen sink. My FC 6 linux laptop -- admittedly running lots of stuff on four simultaneous desktops including -- uses at LEAST 200 MB, more often 300 MB not including buffer/cache. In principle it would work perfectly comfortably on a 512 MB RAM system with a tiny hit when starting up populating memory with its running images. However, the virtual memory foot print (including all pages not currently loaded is maybe half again larger... Another good question is -- now that you've got it running smoothly with enough VM, how hard do you have to push it before it starts to slow down? Can you work on 3-4 ooffice docs simultaneously? At the same time firefox has 4-5 tabs open? With music playing? A few xterms? I dunno, what else, a big mail client like evolution cranking, and anything else that you can think of that a person working on a fairly standard thick client might want to use? I'm trying to figure out where the line is between "thick" and "thin" in this context -- where does one have to add RAM (and how much), where does one have to give up and put in a local disks. Some of this doubtless depends on how fat you set things up in the first place -- one can make a desktop that just doesn't have all of those apps -- but of course it would be loveliest if one could run a thin client with pretty much a "full desktop" and with no interactive performance hit out to way past where normal humans would stop starting new apps. I'm guessing that CPU speed is unimportant, network speed is moderately important, and having a ton of RAM is the most important determiner of thin client performance and robustness... I really have the same questions for the HP users in the HP thin client thread, BTW. If you torture test them, where and how do they fail (for any given HW configuration). rgb -- Robert G. Brown http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/ Duke University Dept. of Physics, Box 90305 Durham, N.C. 27708-0305 Phone: 1-919-660-2567 Fax: 919-660-2525 email:[EMAIL PROTECTED] ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Take Surveys. Earn Cash. Influence the Future of IT Join SourceForge.net's Techsay panel and you'll get the chance to share your opinions on IT & business topics through brief surveys-and earn cash http://www.techsay.com/default.php?page=join.php&p=sourceforge&CID=DEVDEV _____________________________________________________________________ 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
