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Re: [school-discuss] thin clients per server



William

That would be minor lags, not system killers. I have used Flash based educational content in this configuration, running off a local Apache server on the same machine and it's been fine. I keep finding myself surprised at the amount of power a regular P4 CPU has when throwing LTSP clients at it. A server with 2GB RAM and a decent CPU would not even blink at 15 clients.

cheers
ed
On 11 Jun 2005, at 2:47 PM, William Fragakis wrote:

Ed,
Thanks for the reply. How "run out of steam" is it at 25? Minor lags or twiddling thumbs lags?


We will probably have about 10 or 15 clients to a server but Flash is pretty processor hungry and used in a fair amount of "educational" web sites.

I agree with you that RAM is key, anything to keep out of swap space and avoid disk hits. I don't think we'll be doing lots of writes to the disk so I'm trying to avoid the cost of SCSI RAID. We built a server last year (Win2k) and the SCSI card alone was about $400. It's cheaper imho just to stick in an extra server or two. After all, we really aren't serving that many files.

Again, thanks. That's the kind of info I was needing.

Regards,
William
On Jun 11, 2005, at 2:55 AM, Edward Holcroft wrote:


William

I don't have any experience with the Athlon 64, but I find a P4 3GHz starts to run out steam with 25 clients running everyday apps such as OpenOffice simultaneously. RAM is probably the key part of the equation - I use 2GB RAM on a P4 with 20 workstations. This seems to be a working well for me. This is with ordinary IDE drives - no problem there although I guess SCSI would improve things. My clients are P1's with 64MB or 32MB RAM.

ed
On 10 Jun 2005, at 6:49 PM, William Fragakis wrote:


We are looking to replace a school lab full of standalone PCs (Dell 1.6ghz Celerons) with LTSP. I'm wondering what a good client to server ratio would be using something along the lines of a Athlon64 3200 with a 10k SATA drive for the server. Mind you that we may have all the kids hitting Flash driven web sites at the same time and performance shouldn't look shabby compared to the stand alones.

The lab is the first step to converting the rest of the school.

Also, any perceptible difference in using, say 533mhz Via Eden motherboards for the clients vs. 1 ghz Edens?

Many thanks in advance.

William Fragakis
Morris Brandon Elementary
morrisbrandon.com