[K12OSN] Client Ram

Fri May 25 17:03:28 UTC 2007

OK, I'm not a hacker, just a systems engineer, so there's a lot I don't
know here.  I could use a little clarification.  According to this,
you'd likely need 256MB or more in your thin client for just regular ol'
Web surfing, or writing OpenOffice.org documents, or viewing photos of
your kids--anything involving these images getting turned into pixmaps
by *any* X11 application, and 512MB in the client would not be
unreasonable at all.  But now we're getting into thick-client territory;
Dell's new Ubuntu PC's come with 512MB DRAM.

I know, from experience on my thick clients, that X11 can suck up over
400MB until I start shutting apps down (Firefox is one of those apps;
Evolution is another).  However, I also know, from experience, that my
clients with 32MB and 64MB do not die when I use Firefox, etc. 
According to the below, X11 should indeed be dying on them left and
right.  I'm using K12LTSP 4.2EL.  Could there be something else that
we're just missing here?

--TP
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Jim McQuillan wrote:
>
>
> Daniel Bodanske wrote:
>> So Firefox stores pixmaps uncompressed in the X server cache.
>> Unbelievable. Is it Firefox or Gecko? Does Seamonkey suffer the same
>> limitation. Could you move to Epiphany? Wow.
>
> This is not unusual.  everybody seems to be implying that firefox is
> being evil by doing this.
>
> The Xserver caches pixmaps and fonts.  No big deal.  It's part of the
> design of the X Window System.  The problem is, with tabs, the browser
> can actually be viewing more than one page at a time, which means
> there can be alot more pixmaps sent from the browser to the Xserver. 
> The Xserver just happily caches them.
>
> A flaw in this design is the fact that when the thin client gets low
> on memory, the Xserver has no mechanism to deal with it.  It can't
> throw away pixmaps from the cache, because it has no way of telling
> the client application that it no longer has the image cached, so
> there's no way for firefox to re-send the pixmap when the user comes
> back to that page.
>
> So, sadly, the Xserver runs out of memory, and bad things happen.
>
> I've brought this up to the X.org developers and everybody agrees that
> it's a big problem, but unfortunately, there's not an easy fix.
>
> It's not just firefox that is involved here. Any graphical application
> will send images and fonts to the Xserver, and expect those things to
> still be in the Xserver later on.  I suppose Firefox could be modified
> to never expect those things to be cached, which means it would have
> to send the images and fonts each time you switch from one tab to
> another, or scroll the page up and down.  Imagine the screams you'd be
> hearing as the performance goes down the tubes, and the network
> traffic goes through the roof.
>
> We tried fixing this a few years ago in LTSP by placing a limit on how
> much ram the Xserver could allocate.  This managed to keep the Xserver
> from crashing, but then the client application would crash because it
> didn't expect the Xserver to fail to allocate the memory for it.  If
> the client is the browser, the browser would crash, which is easily
> recoverable.  But, what if the client application is something more
> important, like the window manager?
>
> It's a tough problem, and I wish I had the magic fix for it.
>
> Jim McQuillan
> jam at Ltsp.org
>
>
>
>>
>> I began to get scared a few years ago when so many new desktop
>> applications started to get written for Linux. So many of them
>> wouldn't work over the network. I got worried that LTSP might become
>> non-viable some day when all the standard apps needed local resources.
>> Once Freedesktop.org was started and picked up momentum with Jim as
>> one of the founding members, I calmed down, but I guess I shouldn't
>> have. Firefox seems to follow it's own rules all the time, anyway.
>>
>> Dan
>>
>> On 5/25/07, Dan Young <dyoung at mesd.k12.or.us> wrote:
>>> On 5/24/07, Rob Owens <rowens at ptd.net> wrote:
>>> > So maybe the question should be:  Is there a browser that it better
>>> > suited to LTSP than Firfox is?
>>>
>>> Well, part of it comes down to tuning. Eric put together a Firefox
>>> extension that sets several options to more friendly levels. In
>>> particular:
>>>
>>> browser.cache.memory.capacity
>>> and
>>> browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers
>>>
>>> The defaults are variable depending on the total memory of the
>>> computer. Of course, in an LTSP environment, it's all shared, so a 4G
>>> host can't expect to have all that for one browser instance.
>>>
>>> As I understand it, the defaults have been dialed back somewhat for
>>> Firefox 2. Eric's Firefox extension dials back these values too.
>>> http://www.redhat.com/archives/k12osn/2006-May/msg00372.html
>>>
>>> -- 
>>> Dan Young <dyoung at mesd.k12.or.us>
>>> Multnomah ESD - Technology Services
>>> 503-257-1562
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
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>>> For more info see <http://www.k12os.org>
>>>
>>
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