Fedora as a LTSP server?

[Hugo Cisneiros]

Hi!

I always used Red Hat/Fedora Core on many servers, but last month I came with a
new project: Fedora as a LTSP server. Anyone here has done it? I'm asking
because I'm getting some difficulties.

I read many things about LTSP and many people said that they were supporting
like 30-40 users on a P4 2.0 Server with 512mb of ram. "That's great!" - I
thought. So I began installing a LTSP server on Fedora.

I did everything ok and got the server and clients working fine. I began
logging
in on the clients, and when I got 8 to 10 users logged at the same time, the
load average on server was SO HIGH! 15.0! Everything just started to get lagged
and unusable. Since the guys told that they did many clients at the same time,
I
began trying to fix this problem:

1) Mounted the root partition with the noatime option, saving I/O access.
2) Prelinked EVERYTHING on the system
3) Tweaked KDE and kded (this one was eating a lot of cpu) 
4) Turned off all services that I didn't need
5) Tweaked HD with hdparm

And the results: same thing. I tried with three different servers:

First:
Fedora Core 3, latest kernel (2.6.10-1.766_FC3)
KDE 3.3 as Window Manager of choice
Celeron 2.0Ghz
1.5GB RAM
120gb HD

Second:
Fedora Core 3, latest kernel (2.6.10-1.766_FC3)
XFCE as Window Manager of choice
Semprom 2.0Ghz
512MB RAM
40gb HD

Third:
Fedora Core 3 (x86_64), latest kernel (2.6.10-1.766_FC3)
KDE 3.3 as Window Manager of choice
Athlon64 2.2Ghz
512MB RAM
80GB HD

All the same results: High load average, high usage of cpu, no memory problems
(no heavy swap usage) and all clients so slow! :(

I tried many things, then a friend who has done that sugested me to try another
distro, and I tried a KNOPPIX based one just to test. Everything worked fine,
load average was below 0.! Why? :(

Now I'm forced to use another distro for this, but I really want to use Fedora
Core as the server, because I like it so much and it has many resources. So,
anyone here can help me find what's the problem? :(

Thanks!


[]'s
Hugo