I'm pretty sure I get X_RAMPERC.  Maybe I didn't explain the situation
very well.  Or, maybe what I said sounded unbelievable, and I agree it
sounds that way, so you didn't imagine I meant it.

> Unity3D session work" - I would imagine not much at all would work if
> you only allow 20% of your memory to be allocated for the X server on
> the terminal!

Precisely... but.... It won't work at 100% either.  Or at 90, 80, 50
or 20.  Every time, regardless what I do, it accepts the login creds,
plays the music, and boots me back to login.  The issue, best I can
tell, is related to our fancy new hardware.  But, I think something
also got broken in ltsp between 10.0.4 and 11.04, and became slightly
unbroken in 11.10 (but that's an even longer story).

I probably wasn't very clear that the only place I've found a solution
regarding having a session terminate suddenly and being booted back to
login had to do with that setting.  I had ignored the setting because,
as you say, with 2+GB of RAM, it seemed unlikey that was the issue.
But, in desperation I tried it, and much to my surprise, one problem
(VMD) was fixed by altering it.  So, somehow, it's having an effect,
though I don't think it should.


On Tue, Jan 3, 2012 at 3:09 PM, Jordan Erickson
<[email protected]> wrote:
> Hi Lachele,
>
> I haven't had my hands in lts.conf for a little while but I think your
> perception of X_RAMPERC is a little off.
>
> You mentioned that "even setting X_RAMPERC to 20 didn't make the default
> Unity3D session work" - I would imagine not much at all would work if
> you only allow 20% of your memory to be allocated for the X server on
> the terminal!
>
> Check this out. I don't know if you've been posting here in the recent
> past so I apologize if I'm not seeing the context.. but I've dealt with
> X_RAMPERC a lot before regarding older issues with Firefox (pixmap
> cache....groan).
>
> You shouldn't even really worry about X_RAMPERC if you have 2GB+ memory
> on the terminal side, I would imagine. But if you want to make sure your
> entire session doesn't hard-lock because of you running out of memory,
> set it to 95 or something similar, so it will kill any offending
> application that might be gobbling up memory, before it takes the whole
> system down with it.
>
>
> -----
>
>  _X_RAMPERC_
>           default ´100´, Percentage of RAM for X server
>
>           Some programs allocate a large amount of ram in the X.org server
>           running on your thin client. Programs like *Firefox* and *Evince* 
> can
>           use up so much ram, that they eventually exhaust all your physical
>           ram, and NBD swap, causing your thin client to crash. If you find
>           your clients being booted back to a login prompt, or freezing up
>           when viewing certain PDF´s or web pages, this may be the problem.
>
>           The _X_RAMPERC_ variable stands for X RAM PERCent, and is a number
>           between 0 and 100 that specifies how much of the free space on your
>           thin client X.org is allowed to consume. You´ll generally want to
>           set it at something lower than 100 percent, if you´re having
>           problems. Experimentation has shown a value between 80 and 90 will
>           usually keep the terminal alive. What will then happen is the
>           program consuming the memory will die, as opposed to the thin
>           client itself. If you´re having unexplained terminal problems,
>           specifying:
>
>           X_RAMPERC = 80
>
>           in your lts.conf file may improve things.
> -----
>
>
> Again, I hope I'm not out of context and that this info helps. =)
>
>
> Cheers,
> Jordan
>
>
>
>
> On 01/03/2012 08:29 AM, Lachele Foley (Lists) wrote:
>> I'm really confused about why changing X_RAMPERC fixed one problem,
>> and if so, why it didn't fix another.
>>
>> The issue is that clients with less RAM won't need to have X_RAMPERC
>> set lower, but clients with more RAM will.  There are other
>> differences, of course -- different hardware, different client image
>> (64 vs 32).  But, it seems odd that a client with 1 GB of RAM can
>> handle something that a client with 2 or 4 GB can't.
>>
>> And, I'm not talking about a system that has other programs eating
>> memory.  I mean (1) boot client, (2) log in, (3) start or start to use
>> program, (4) back to login immediately.  On one machine (loaner, no
>> longer available for testing), this would cause it:  (1) boot (2) log
>> in (3) open terminal (4) "ltsp-localapps xterm".  I'm surprised that
>> opening a couple terminals could eat that much memory that quickly.  I
>> didn't try resetting X_RAMPERC on that machine because I simply could
>> not believe that was the problem.  I could open and run other programs
>> -- there were only a few that caused it.  When they did, though, they
>> did so immediately or almost immediately.
>>
>> Most recently, the program VMD would cause crash-to-login if its
>> display window was moved from one monitor to the other.  Again, this
>> is at fresh boot and login, and without having even loaded any files
>> into VMD.  Oddly, running VMD as a localapp on the client worked fine
>> (and a lot faster).  However, I finally decided to try lowering
>> X_RAMPERC, and, lo-and-behold, VMD stopped crashing when not run
>> locally.  These clients have 4 GB and the server has 32.  During these
>> tests, there was very little load on the server either.  Right now,
>> with three different browsers, each with multiple windows, evince and
>> a handful of terminals running, that same client says it has 3.37 GB
>> of its 3.94 GB free (using "free").  I just opened VMD, and that
>> changed to 3.36 free.  We also have several dual-monitor setups on
>> older equipment that handle this sort of thing just fine, and lots of
>> other stuff, all at once.
>>
>> So, even though setting X_RAMPERC fixed the VMD issue... I wonder if
>> the problem isn't really somewhere else.
>>
>> By the way, even setting X_RAMPERC to 20 didn't make the default
>> Unity3D session work.  It still appears to accept a password, then
>> makes the theme music, then back to login.  Other sessions (2D, XFCE,
>> LDXE, xterm) work fine.
>>
>
>
> --
> Jordan Erickson (PGP: 0xDA470FF8)
> LNS: (707) 636-5678  - http://logicalnetworking.net
>
>
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-- 
:-) Lachele
Lachele Foley
CCRC/UGA
Athens, GA USA

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