Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-edu (61 mails)

["francis stanbridge" <fbs@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Not sure about the technicalities (at this time of night!) - some
practical experience to gauge from:

Red Hat 9.0, LTSP,(GNOME desktop) Dual Athlon 1.5 GHz , SCSI UW
h.drive, 1 GB ram (homebrewed junk) - seems to support 20 ~ 30
clients OK - browser is Mozilla.  Have not pushed it further - yet!
Reliability - 100% !  I just do nothing to this server (other than
reboot due to poor cooling causing a thermal trip) - we now use it
for DHCP and DNS - its just better than the other brand for what we
require.

In comparison our 3 Win 2k terminal servers - dual cpu 800 Mz, 1 GB
ram, SCSI U2W hard drives will support 50 windows terminal server
clients each - at a push this has been up to 70 clients. It scales
well.  (This is not a plug for MS - we will move to an 80 % + Linux
server and client network this summer).When freshly installed will
run for weeks on end with v.good performance. Percieved performance
e.g. loading Publisher, image manipulation in Photoimpact is good.
Currently it requires daily reboot,  Also suffer (at present) similar
slowing down problems.  Time for a re-install - yawn...


The cheap, pragmatic solution - 

1. Try Mozilla
2. More memory - try another GB (ie £100)

Based on the Windows experience (not direct but the only data I can
compare with) I would anticipate 1 x 1 GHz cpu supporting 20 ~ 25
clients reasonably. 

Good Luck

Francis







Francis Stanbridge
Community College
Bishop's Castle
Shropshire
SY9 5AY

tel: 01588 638257
fax: 01588 630034