[K12OSN] Where is the bottleneck?

[Joseph Bishay]

Hello,

Thank you for all your recommendations in your email.

On Wed, Jul 28, 2010 at 12:49 PM, William Fragakis <william at fragakis.com> wrote:
> I  just ran the same video on an Intel atom single core. I have 14
> windows open in Firefox ver. 3.6, Flash ver. 10.1. I'm running F13 on
> the AMD x2 server and and F12 on the client at 1280x1024. Gigabit
> through two switches to the client. I'm even running Compiz on the
> clients.

In that case one major difference may be the server the clients are
running on. I am running LTSP 5 on Fedora 10 on a Pentium 4, 2.4 GHz

> Things to check: versions of Flash and Firefox. Each edition gets better
> and faster.

That may be part of the issue - because there has been no new release
of K12Linux, I am stuck running the Firefox and flash versions that
are available for Fedora 10 (ver 3.0.15) and flash (ver
10.1)

> Just because the switches and NICs are gigabit, check that it's actually
> connecting at that rate - ie not a bad cable or connection along the
> line.

Thank you again for this.  I took a quick look and it seems that the
last step of the trip (from switch to thin client) is NOT running at
gigabit.  Rather strange.  I will take at it again in more detail to
determine if it's the cable or the network card.

> What color depth are you using? 32 bit is overkill and uses vastly more
> resources.

I went into lts.conf and uncommented X_COLOR_DEPTH=16 as it was
commented out.  Do you know if there is a way to test that the change
has actually happened?

> Make sure that the clients aren't using vesa drivers.

Unfortunately a few of our clients are stuck with VESA drivers as
nothing else seems to work (again I believe this is a result of
running an older version of software so the drivers aren't available).
 In this particular case, however, the test client is NOT running with
the VESA driver.

> Are you
> using ssh encryption on the server client connection?

SSH encryption on the server-client connection has been turned off, as
that was commonly cited as a bottleneck.

> What screen resolution are you running on the client?

Resolution is 1680x1050 set automatically.

> Finally, that's way overkill for a core2duo to be the client. It could
> serve 10-20  clients on its own. You should be running localapps or
> drbl.

You are correct that the machine is way overkill -- I used it for
testing as a best-case scenario. It's actually a windows machine that
dual-boots as a client because of its location in the school.  All our
other clients are Pentium II or Pentium III machines.

> Regards,
> William

Thank you for your help -- hopefully I can figure out if there are any
more issues to resolve this.

Thanks,
Joseph