A dual core "server" CPU are sufficient for running 70 thin client (X-server based) on 100 Mbit/s switched network, with 50 clients actively in use. It's not sufficient for running flash animations with heavy graphics or videos. You might get away with running 60 clients turning of all the bling you got on modern Linux desktops.
It's the 100 Mbit/s network which is the bottleneck in this setup where each client are running 1-2 Mbit/s in fully use (when not running video which often takes 20-30 Mbit/s through an X-protocol). To make it simple, 50 clients * 2 Mbit/s = 100 Mbit/s. Regarding video and heavy flash graphics. It's takes milliseconds before your'e ending up supporting only 4-5 concurrent clients. More than that, both network and CPU are saturated with traffic and workload. (Running Citrix, RDP or FreeNX with video or heavy graphics are worse than the X-protocol. Microsoft experts recommends to limit number of clients to 25-30 to a Citrix server. Video and flash are not recommended at all in such setup.) For running +50 concurrent client on a server, I would consider a 1 Gbit/s thin client network (you might split it from a 1 Gbit/s backbone network to 100 Mbit/s switches with 1 Gbit/s "input" and a 100 Mbit/s "output". I'm simplifying the Internet protocol here to explain highly advanced bandwidth calculations here, to make it with simple multiplications). The need for dual core or quad core CPU are a little more flexible. You can run dual core for 60 thin clients. Since now 1Gbit/s network are available for a while, now also being affordable. It changes the number of thin X-clients you can run on a 1 Gbit/s switched backbone thin client network. I don't know the exact number, but 150 or even 200 thin client might supported depending on throughput capacity on the switches (and cables). Then a 150 thin clients setup might work. Remember then also memory consumption and more CPU power might be required. E.g. quad core CPU and 16 GB RAM for 150 thin clients. Of course running lowfat clients (diskless) are recommended. You can run 150 lowfat clients on a 100 Mbit/s network. You get full video and flash support. Such setup needs clients with +512 MB RAM and +1,5 GHz CPU and a server with 2 GB RAM and dual (or even single core) CPU. Also, you can run such a setup in a combination. E.g run 40 thin client on old hardware and 20 lowfat clients for newer hardware :) Many schools does that too :) Beste hilsener Knut Yrvin -- mob: + 47 934 79 561 2014-02-05 15:17 GMT+01:00 Franklin Weng <[email protected]>: > Hi Knut, > > > Thanks for your detail explanation. > > > For "thin client", which runs applications at server side, you just > mentioned network bandwidth issue. However, besides network bandwidth > issue, how many clients can a main server afford? In the "Requirement" > document it mentioned 4GB for 50-60 clients. Will the server CPU loading > too heavy when 60 clients run concurrently? > > > Franklin -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected] Archive: http://lists.debian.org/cakrkzjd+wzz4fijj6914vdwehrozqhzrodzo9uxbgeq505_...@mail.gmail.com
