[K12OSN] OT: still have sluggish system

[dahopkins at comcast.net]

All, this is OT, but an issue that I have to resolve.

Systems at NCS are still very very very (...) sluggish once more than about 10 users log on.  No idea why.  I have noticed that using usb devices exacerbates the situation tremendously.  I have posted to ltsp and recieved some suggestions that I can try, but ... has anyone seen sluggish behavior on their systems with FC5?  df -k hangs,  rdesktop is unusable for all practical purposes, anything that access the filesystem just crawls (e.g. ls -l), or using StarOffice, etc.  ifconfig shows the NICs with no errors, also, no swap is being used, load average though is often past 20. top isn't showing any process with more than 3% cpu, most are fractional percentages. But ... network traffic is very very high.  I guess it could be a NIC issue, but on all my servers across 3 different switches?  Before the upgrade to the latest release, things ran spiffy.  With 10 or so users, things run spiffy, add 5 or so more, and things crawl.

Also, I noticed after the upgrade that users cannot connect to one of the Win2K terminal servers unless they first connect to the other Win2K server. But this is only from one of the upgraded systems, the other works fine. 

Anyhow, thanks for reading, and any advice is appreciated.

Sincerely,
Dave Hopkins
Newark Charter School