[ale] SWAP over NFS

[Chris Fowler]

On Wed, 2008-04-16 at 21:20 -0400, Jeff Hubbs 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.
> 

On the TC with 128m of memory it was crashing with just Xfce.  I never
made it to attempt firefox.  On the TC with 256m I was able to get
firefox to load and get to youtube.  Once I started that, it crashed. 

For my system and a friends  I think what we will do is use SWAP over
NFS like I've been doing it and upgrade the memory to something
substantial like 512 or even a gig since it is so cheap.  These TCs are
not very old and the CPU is comparable to what is in the Eee.

I'm trying to get a similar system working for his children's school
(private).  I think the tough test part is getting them to be open
minded about something new.

I just did the webkinz :( test and it works fine.  So there is real
potential here for me to implement this system for my kids and his kids.

The fewer moving parts the better.  These devices have no fans and no
hard drives.  They do have doms that can be used to hold a kernel and an
initrd to skip PXE or the doms can be used for swap.  To get the device
to not crash I've used the dom as swap and I have a 128mb USB disk in as
swap for backup.  I think that SWAP over NFS is fine when we get some
real memory in the machine.  I think what I'm experiencing is that you
need memory to free memory and this is causing my crash.  

I might try NBD next and see how that goes. 


Chris