[K12OSN] bottleneck question

[Les Mikesell]

On Wed, 2004-09-08 at 13:54, Liam Marshall wrote:
> It is the first day of school, so of course I have discovered a
> problem.  Running K12LTSP server and 31 thin clients.  All are able to
> connect, but after attempting to all surf with Mozilla at the same time
> it slowed down seriously

If it only happens with Mozilla, it may be internet bandwidth instead
of a local problem.  Or if there are a lot of animated graphics it
could be server bandwidth toward the clients.

> ran top on server, which has hyperthreading single cpu 3.06 MHz and 2 GB
> RAM.  cpu usage total says 152% with roughly 70% on cpu01 and 80 % on
> cpu00
> 
> memory free down to 400 MB.
> 
> There is not much I can do immediately about the cpu.  I can increase
> the memory to 4GB if I new that would help

You can't tell much from the 'free' memory because additional memory
will be used as buffers.

> will it, or will the cpu usage still be really high, which according to
> top is the killer?

If you are using a substantial amount of swap (see top) or it is
very active (do a 'vmstat 5' and watch when the system is busy)
then adding memory will help a lot.  If normal activity doesn't
use swap, adding RAM will still help but won't make a big difference.

---
  Les Mikesell
   les at futuresource.com