We upgraded to 1 GB of memory, and that helped keep everything responsive when all 8 clients were active, but it still wasn't "snappy".
We then upgraded to a 2.8 Ghz Pentium 4 server using a SCSI 320 drive with 1 GB of RAM, and performance was noticeably faster. The launch time for Firefox dropped from about 3.5+ seconds to 1.5 seconds. This met our goal of being subjectively "faster" than recent model PCs running Windows XP - which was the standard set by management.
I'm sure we could have improved responsiveness with lighter-weight window managers, better tuning of the server, multiple drives etc, but this was "good enough" so we stopped trying to improve performance. This setup has worked flawlessly as internet kiosks for months with no maintenance.
I think we have headroom for more clients without additional tuning or memory - but not a lot more given the expectation of high responsiveness. I expect if all our clients were working in OpenOffice, Mozilla etc, we would definitely need more server resources (certainly more RAM). As to workstation versus server, our "server" was built from plain PC components - if I was going to put many clients on the server, I wouldn't do that - I'd go with a server-class system using RAID, redundant power supplies, ECC memory etc.
Personally I don't think it would be a good idea to put a lot of other services on the LTSP server, -- but it would depend on workload and applications. We happened to use a Cisco PIX for the firewall because we already had one in place, so I can't comment on putting that function on the LTSP server.
Tim
Krsnendu dasa wrote:
No reply as yet. Another hardware related question I want to ask is it a good idea to use
the LTSP server as the allpurpose server (ie. Windows Domain logon
server, file server, internet gateway, etc..) or is it better to split
the services between computers.
The optimal memory requirements and hard drive usage of a file server
and a terminal server may be very different, and therefore both could be
optimized better with their own machines. E.g. The file server may have
bigger hard drives optimized for reliability and backup purposes,
whereas the terminal server might have more ram and smaller hard drive
set up of fast access.
On the other hand, using one powerful machine may do both jobs quite adequately but all the eggs would be in one basket and if anything went wrong the whole system would go down.
Overall I am looking for the most cost effective solution, but I want
decent performance also.
I have also heard that there are advantages to using a standalone computer for the internet gateway/firewall. Any comments?
<snip>
I plan to network about 10-20 thin clients.
What is the minimum reasonable hardware I should use for the server. Do I need a "server" as such or can a powerful workstation do the trick, e.g. Duron 1.6 80Gb 7200rpm IDE133 Drive256MB DDR266 ram?
I am using K12LTSP v4.0 Fedora core 1
------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by The 2004 JavaOne(SM) Conference Learn from the experts at JavaOne(SM), Sun's Worldwide Java Developer Conference, June 28 - July 1 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, CA REGISTER AND SAVE! http://java.sun.com/javaone/sf Priority Code NWMGYKND _____________________________________________________________________ Ltsp-discuss mailing list. To un-subscribe, or change prefs, goto: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/ltsp-discuss For additional LTSP help, try #ltsp channel on irc.freenode.net
