Hi guys! I recently deployed a number of LTSP sites for a social project - hope to include it soon on the LTSP Success Cases List! :) - where we used up to 10 thin clients with no local apps running. The server was based on a 3.0GHz P4 (Prescott) running a 2.6.12.3 kernel (with SMP enabled for Hyper Threading), 1GB DDR400 RAM and a single 80GB 7200rpm ATA drive. Throughout the test phase everything worked just fine and I guess it could take even more clients.
Now I'm about to install LTSP for a school where they will use 25 thin clients, but I don't have the resources to test it before they buy everything, so I'd like to know from anybody who already implemented LTSP networks this size (or larger) what would be the minimum specs for a server like this. I should say they will almost always use the same app on all clients at a given time, which could be basically OpenOffice 2.0, firefox and an accounting program (probably GNUCash). I think of using a 10/100 switch with a Gigabit uplink to the server, but I'm not sure how much memory would be enough (maybe 2GB is allright?). Also, apart from redundancy, would a Linux Software RAID 1 configuration do any good regarding data throughoutput? What do you have to say about a P4 3.0GHz vs. an AMD64? I read here all the time of people using dual processor boards for big LTSP servers... for 25 clients that would be really necessary or it can live well just with a single P4 HT / AMD64? I appreciate any input I can get and would like to thank everyone involved in making and enhancing this great system! []s Claudio Hi, Claudio. I have some experience with LTSP and LTSP-like environments, so I can shed some light to your doubts. Memory, as you may already know, is the cheapest and most substantial upgrade you can make on your machine. The statement "the more the better", in this case, is true. I would recommend you to get at least 2 gigs; this amount would be enough for now, but if you want some scalability, regarding number of users or even applications, why not more? There is a friend of mine who uses to setup a swap partition on a ramdisk, so he never uses the disk for memory management. This would save a lot of processing and disk usage for you. When you have so much users and start using swap, the performance gets worse very easily, and this is a real problem, because so many users will keep the server much busy all the time. In a "memory usage by-user" approach, Jim uses to recommend 50~75 megs of RAM per user; but this is just an estimative if you really have no clue of how much RAM you will spend on the server. Now, about the hardware: AMD has two advantages: price and performance. Hyperthreading doesn't work as it should on the Pentium. It, instead, uses bandwidth of the processor to "simulate" a second processor. Surely it has more performance than in single-processor, but comparing to an equivalent AMD, most graphics show it has more disvantages than advantages. Take a look at Tom's Hardware Guide site and see it for yourself. I bought, three months ago, a AMD 64 2800+ processor with 640k of cache for R$ 420,00 (note: this is brazillian currency, it is about R$ 2,5 / US$ 1,00). I found it pretty cheap comparing to Pentiums. Hope to have helped, cheers! -- Eduardo Costa Lisboa -- Eduardo Costa Lisboa ------------------------------------------------------- SF.Net email is Sponsored by the Better Software Conference & EXPO September 19-22, 2005 * San Francisco, CA * Development Lifecycle Practices Agile & Plan-Driven Development * Managing Projects & Teams * Testing & QA Security * Process Improvement & Measurement * http://www.sqe.com/bsce5sf _____________________________________________________________________ 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
