[K12OSN] Performance issue and question
Dean Weiten
dmw at weiten.com
Fri Nov 5 17:42:52 UTC 2004
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.
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