[ale] SWAP over NFS

[Jim Kinney]

To chime in here:

The thin clients we used has 128 MB RAM and were molasses-slow-in-winter.
But firefox was just fine. The app runs on the server and only the display
bit go to the client. the x-server on the client will back-cache page draws
so forward and back buttons are OK as well.
Flash is a hog and would bog down the server since it doesn't thread AT
FREAKIN' ALL! <mutters 'bout crappy programs>. Each flah applet on a page
opens a new flash instance.

NFS is ill suited for swap but it will work. NBD is much better for it.

Go grab K12LTSP-EL (the CentOS5 version) and look at what they did for swap
with clients.

Now that stuff is _thin_clients_ NOT diskless workstations. DW actually runs
binaries locally from a remote mounted / partition. NFS / works but again
NBD is better suited. The Ubuntu LTSP stuff uses NBD (I think) for a DW
setup.

There is some good movement on K12LTSP to have a series of apps run local on
the client (firefox with flash and streaming video is the main drive) to
offload the decompression to the client to stop bogging down the server. A
work party made it happen about 6 months ago but they have not published
what they did or how to replicate it. Current focus is getting LTSP5 merged
into Fedora properly and permanently. I don't think they are going to make
F9 due to many design issues with LTSP that don't fit well  with Fedoras
strict adherence to FSH. But I could be wrong.

On Wed, Apr 16, 2008 at 9:20 PM, Jeff Hubbs <hbbs at comcast.net> wrote:

> Why not run the RAM-hungry apps on a server and just export the displays
> to the diskless workstations a la LTSP?  In Jim's, Aaron's, and my
> Atlanta Public Schools project, we found that multiple instances of
> Firefox serving dozens of workstations doesn't have a horribly bad RAM
> footprint (unless of course FF, the Flash plugin, or Java got to
> seriously misbehaving).  Best to throw RAM into an app server.
>
> Chris Fowler wrote:
> > I've been doing more playing and got SWAP over NFS to work via Xubuntu
> > 7.10 on a machine with 128m of memory
> >
> > It is becoming clear to me that to keep up with the latest software like
> > firefox and a 64mb or even a 128mb diskless workstation no longer
> > exists.  Xubuntu over NFS becomes useless once Xfce fires up.  I've
> > watched vmstat in another window and the swap over NFS does work but the
> > amount being swapped out is outrageous.
> >
> > I guess I could get the box running on an earlier FC disti but what
> > about memory hungry firefox?  I think the best thing is that diskless
> > workstations have at least 512m of memory.
> >
> > Chris
> >
> >
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> >
> >
>
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-- 
-- 
James P. Kinney III
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