[K12OSN] More feedback on Fedora 10 + LTSP

[James P. Kinney III]

On Tue, 2009-04-28 at 22:30 -0400, Warren Togami wrote:
> On 04/28/2009 10:11 PM, James P. Kinney III wrote:
> > David,
> >
> > As wonderful as tuxmath is (it's a great game/tool) is has a design
> > problem that makes it unsuitable for LTSP. The screen draw rate is
> > clocked by wait cycles as dummy loops. The system literally polls "is it
> > time to send a screen update now". While the load is minimal, it pushes
> > the next cycle onto a timer. So the system get dog slow and the load is
> > not high yet the client end is uselessly slow. The loop timer is
> > calculated once at startup and can't change as the load the goes up.
> >
> > The _entire_ game loop depends on this timing cycle. The heavier the
> > server load the more out of sync this clocking becomes. Short of a
> > rewrite I was never able to do more than a few tweaks to it. Because of
> > the way multicore systems handle thread swaps, tuxmath actually makes a
> > killer test on cpu efficiency.
> 
> This is an accurate assessment.  Tuxmath and tuxtype are unusable for 
> LTSP.  It is just poorly designed.  It could possibly be fixed by a 
> programmer who understands this stuff.

I tried digging into it about 2 years back but realized it's an
architectural issue. At that point it was more than I could tackle to
start from scratch.

Yes. Tuxtype has the same issues as it uses the same engine.The SDL
stuff is cross-platform nice but it has to make many, many compromises
to work. 
> 
> Warren
> 
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> 
-- 
James P. Kinney III          
CEO & Director of Engineering 
Local Net Solutions,LLC                           
http://www.localnetsolutions.com

GPG ID: 829C6CA7 James P. Kinney III (M.S. Physics)
<jkinney at localnetsolutions.com>
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