--- On Mon, 2/9/09, Jim McQuillan <j...@mcquil.com> wrote:
> Nicholas,
>
> 2 things to consider here.
>
> 1) the NIC in the workstation. 10/100 vs Gigabit is
> important as you've found out. But, what's also
> important is the chipset in the NIC. Some chipsets are MUCH
> better than others. Consider the difference between an
> RTL8139 and a 3Com 3c905 or Intel eepro100. They all claim
> to be 10/100, but the RTL8139 has almost no intelligence at
> all. It depends entirely on the CPU to do all the work.
> Whereas, the 3com and Intel chipsets do much of the
> processing onboard, relieving the host CPU of the burden.
> Also, the quality of the drivers is important. Some drivers
> for some chipsets aren't advanced enough to take
> advantage of some of the performance features of the
> chipset. In the world of Opensource, sometimes it's
> enough just to get the chipset working and the refinement of
> eeking the ultimate performance just hasn't happened
> yet.
>
> 2) The video chipset. It boils down to the same issues as
> the NIC chipset. Some chipsets do all the work for you,
> others rely on the host cpu to do much of the work. With
> video, the choice of driver can be more important, because
> there's often more choices.
>
> Most thin client hardware has fairly low-end components
>
> There's really nothing inherent in LTSP that should
> cause it to be slower than a full computer with Linux loaded
> on the harddrive. Since release 5 of LTSP, it's used
> the same Xorg, same kernels, same NIC drivers, and same
> glibc as the host installation.
>
> When comparing the relative performance of different
> workstations, I think it would be very helpful to know the
> details of each machine. The Video, Network and CPU
> obviously can have a significant impact on overall
> performance.
>
> Beyond that, we can start to look at what kind of network
> traffic is being generated by the Java apps. tcpdump and
> wireshark can be very helpful in watching what is going on.
>
> Hope that helps,
> Jim McQuillan
> j...@ltsp.org
>
Thank you, Jim! I appreciate your feedback.
I pulled the gigabit card out of my older workstation and got it working in my
newer computer so I can boot it into Windows XP, Ubuntu Hardy, or as a thin
client. I put a 3Com 905c-TXM card into the old computer and got it running
tonight, and it can boot into Windows 98, SuSE Linux 10.2, and as a thin client.
So, we have two computers that we can test with as either a thin client or as a
regular Linux workstation with the ssh -X.
With the gigabit card in my primary workstation, Netbeans obviously runs faster
when the PC is run as a thin client. However, quite a few people have run into
this problem of Java apps running slowly, so if you and/or others wouldn't
mind, I think it'd be really nice if we could get to the bottom of this problem.
So, if you're willing to help with this, what should I do to help? I have
wireshark installed on our LTSP server; but having used it in the past, I know
it generates some some very lengthy output. If you'd like me to run wireshark
while doing some basic tests in Netbeans, how would you like me to post that
info? On the list? Or some other way?
I'm looking forward to hearing from you.
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