On Mon, Oct 6, 2008 at 10:21 AM, Jason Grout <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > William Stein wrote: >> 2008/10/6 Thierry Dumont <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: >>> I would like to know if someone as used Sage with undergraduate >>> students. My question is mainly a question about the material which >>> would be necessary. >>> >>> We are currently building a project (this means: asking for money, doing >>> a lot a bureaucracy and so on) on Sage in my University: the idea is to >>> start the replacement of the current commercial system (Maple) by Sage. >>> Nowadays, students use Maple on a network of Windows machines. We would >>> like to make a large Sage server so that all the students use the web >>> interface. >>> >>> I can add to Sage an identification on the ldap server (actually active >>> directory) of the University, and Sage accounts will be created >>> automatically. >>> >>> The more difficult question for us is: which machine? One can expect to >>> have about 200 students using Sage at the same time, with large >> >> There is no way you can have 200 students all using exactly one >> sage notebook server on the same port *at the same time* and >> have it feel snappy still. I've done classes with 30 people at once >> and that worked OK -- the server I used was sage.math (16 1.8Ghz >> opterons from 2005). If you ran say 6 different servers, even on the >> same hardware, at once, that would probably work fairly well. >> Probably using two of the 8-core 32GB of RAM machines you list >> below, with say three sage notebook servers on each, would work >> reasonably well. >> >> If you publish the relevant notebooks the students need, and >> just redirect students from some master login page to one of those >> six distinct servers, this could work pretty well. >> >>> subgroups of students doing the same thing at the same time. Ok, as it >>> is undergraduate students, they will not make very large computations... >>> But what about the "scalability" of Sage, of the web server? >> >> To emphasize again, I doubt it scales to more than 30 users all hammering >> the server at once. >> >>> We are currently looking at machines with 2x4 core processors, 32 gb of >>> RAM, 2x450 Gb of disk (raid1). Larger machines exists, but are extremely >>> expensive. We can ask for two machines like this. >>> >>> As anyone some experience in this domain? >> >> sagenb.org obviously has a lot of usage. >> I basically started it as a server from scratch >> 1 month ago, and over 750 people created >> accounts on it during the last month. > > > Can anyone comment on the possibility of running 25-30 sage sessions > from the command line on a modest configuration? In other words, is the > problem in running 25-30 sage processes, or is the bottleneck in the > webserver and notebook interface?
If your hardware is pretty good (which the OP's hardware is), the problem is definitely the webserver and notebook interface. Running many sage sessions at once gets around this. Note -- if the notebook servers all operated on the same data (via a central database or files on the filesystem or something), then one could have the best of both worlds... I guess. But I doubt I'm putting another month of my life into the Sage notebook anytime in the near future. > Based on your comment about running several servers on the same box, it > seems that the problem is that the web server cannot handle very many > concurrent connections. In that case, the recent query about using sage > with mod_python or some other higher performance solution might be worth > looking at again. Maybe it would be.... William --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to sage-support@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-support URLs: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
