Bob Chalifour skrev:
I just played a dvd on my ltsp workstation using the Totem Movie Player
and got a very choppy output. On the ltsp-server the dvd played
normally. I am trying to figure out why this is the case.
My setup is; server: Mandrake 10.1 on a compaq deskpro pentium III, 500
Mhz, with 260 Mb of ram. The ethernet card is a 3-COM 3C905c-TXM,
etherlink 10/100 PCI. I recently installed ltsp 4.1.1 from the
ltsp-4.1.1-1.iso isoimage.
The workstation is a compacq deskpro pentium I, 200 Mhz mmx, with 64 Mb
ram. 3-COM 3c905-TX, 10/100 PCI.
Using the “Monitor Connection” utility in the "Mandrake Control Center",
I can see that the transmition speed on eth1, which connects to my
internal network, is an average of 4.3 MB/s. This is much lower than the
100 MB/s I believe my NICs are capable of giving.
Is there something I should be doing to get the connection between the
server and workstation to run faster?
Running such graphics intensive applications as a movie player, sending
the output across the network to a thin client, will tax your network
severly. Although screen size and color depth can influence the
bandwidth usage, you are stretching all the components to their limit.
Network cards and their interrupt levels play an important part here, as
do the cabling and switches. It may well be that the thin client CPU is
very busy handling the interrupts generated by the NIC, and has little
time to deal with the graphics. This could also be the case on the
server. CAT5 cables should be capable of transmitting 100 mbits/sec, but
there might bottlenecks also there. I assume you have a switched network
with full duplex capabilities that are used by the NICs, otherwise you
bandwidth will not be 100 mbits/sec in any case.
It is possible to monitor the hardware parameters on the thin client
(use ltspinfo, see http://wiki.ltsp.org/twiki/bin/view/Ltsp/LtspinfoTips
for a primer), see if you can discover something from that. On the
server it is easier to get info, open a terminal window and use the command
vmstat 2
to see output that will be quite revealing.
Ragnar
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