[K12OSN] Client Ram

[Jesse McDonnell]

On Wed, 23 May 2007 18:25:59 -0700
"Robert Arkiletian" <robark at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 5/23/07, Kemp, Levi <lnkemp at bolivar.k12.mo.us> wrote:
> > I've got a lab full of iPaqs (500MHz) that I'm pulling all the hard drives from to use for LTSP. The drives are going to go out to teacher computers that are in desperate need of a new drive, the iPaq drives were bought last year. I'm also considering filling the iPaqs with 32MB sticks of Ram. They have two slots so I'd get 64 in there, or I could use a 64 and a 32 to get 96. Right now most have 192 or 256 using 128 and 64 sticks. I'd like to know what you all think about it, I haven't seem much difference running 64 vs 256, and the teachers computers could really use the boost to handle XP.
> 
> 
> Go with 64+32. With only 64 you sometimes go into swap on the client
> when using firefox. And if swap is not enabled, they reboot. At least
> that's what I experienced. I was using 24 bit color on the clients.
> After adding more ram (128) they never rebooted. 

I frequent some motorcycle forums where posters link to lots and lots of high res pictures of bikes, trip pictures etc. and I often have six or more tabs open in Firefox. Add to this scenario the fact that this is a home pc and it's on for days at a time. With a Jammin 125 with 64MB of ram I would hit swap fairly often though I could reduce how often this happened by keeping an eye on client ram use and killing the X-server before ram got too low. Just shutting down Firefox was never very effective at releasing memory.

I upgraded to a Term 150e with 128MB of ram a few weeks ago and have only hit swap a few times since, even then swap use was miniscule, less than 1KB. I have noticed, however, that with the same type of browsing activity the client uses more of the available memory. What before would have sucked up 60 out of the available 64M is now using say 80 out of the available 120M - it's not possible to track very precisely. 

This suggests that there's probably a memory sweet spot - 128M is working fine for me but 96M may also have been enough. If your teachers aren't browsing graphic intensive sites and shut down their clients every day then you should have a nice comfort margin with the 96M Robert suggested. 

Jesse McDonnell