[K12OSN] Performance issue and question

[Dean Weiten]

Hi there,

St. Charles Catholic School in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, has been using
K12LTSP for a couple of months now, and for the most part, we love it.  At
least, I love it, and the kids enjoy playing with it... and let's say
everyone else is coping...

The main complaint that I have, and can't seem to address, is the
performance.  Although the server is not top-of-the-line, it is a 2.6 GHz or
so Intel Pentium with "hyperthreading" on a brand new Asus motherboard.

Now, we did originally have a problem with dropped Ethernet packets (see my
earlier post, as a reply to someone who had a similar problem), and fixing
that problem (by disabling the APIC) helped network performance a lot.

However, the big "performance" issue is something that I see even if I log
onto the server - which leads me to believe that it is not network related.

That is, it takes an awfully long time for any given selected program to
load.  In some cases, I can wait up to 5 or 10 seconds, just to load a shell
(Xterm or whatever).  You can sometimes click on an item, and the disk isn't
accessed for 3 to 5 seconds.

I had assumed that second copies would load faster - but that is not the
case.

I switched to IceWM to make things faster in general.  However, IceWM
doesn't have the rotating hourglass, and folks get very confused, thinking
that nothing is happening.

I am starting to think that it has something to do with Gnome, its menu
structure, and the way it launches programs.  Further, I see that IceWM has
pulled in the Gnome menu tree, so I was thinking that it could also be to
blame there.

In other machines I have running Mandrake and IceWM, response is snappy for
most applications, except the biggest ones like Mozilla and OpenOffice.

I wonder what I can do to disable the loading of the Gnome menu tree into
IceWM.

Does anyone have any other ideas?

Regards,

Dean Weiten.