[ale] SWAP over NFS

[JK]

Jim Kinney wrote:
> 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.

Though I would expect all Flash instances running on the server
would share the same shared libs for the Flash runtime environment.
So the CPU hit might be substantial, but the memory cost should
be only what Flash needs to interpret the script, and you'd have
to pay that cost in any case.  Come to think of it, the CPU cost
should be about the same, too, modulo cost of process creation
vs thread creation -- whether one instance or a dozen interpret
a page with a dozen Flash scripts, there's still going to have
to be approximately the same amount of work done for each of those
scripts.  And last time I paid attention, threads on Linux were
actually implemented as processes that share the same virtual
address space.  So it would surprise me if the resource usage for
a threaded Flash runtime were too terribly different from an
instance-per-script one.  I think the cost of interpreting
Flash scripts is just high, period.

-- JK, just rambling

-- 
I do not particularly want to go where the money is -
  it usually does not smell nice there. -- A. Stepanov