Which hardware?

[Dan Young]

James Call wrote:
> I agree with Dan Young.

Just for context, we were discussing server-sizing on the -users list. :-)

> We have 25 clients running on a 3gig amd dual core.  If you had the
> computers just sitting there and everyone is using some low profile
> program like gedit - no problemo.
> 
> When you set everyone to open wikipedia and look at electric cars,
> then a few kids find a flash animation or something, the whole system
> crashes.

A common complaint with Flash, as I understand it. Maybe the Flashblock 
extension would help, requiring users to click on Flash content to 
activate it. At least it would suppress spurious advertisements.
http://flashblock.mozdev.org/

> When you say "ok open oo writer" yes the server does cringe.
> If you get a few kids that let the screen saver run, that can make
> your server have heart failure.

Ha, yeah, I considered wrapping it in a shell script that would sleep a 
small random period of time before launching, a la Ethernet collision 
avoidance.

> I am looking for some sort of a better server, or using some thick
> clients or booting from a cd or something to try and take the load off
> our server.  We want to get about 20-30 more clients hooked up.

Consider load balancing across several servers that NFS mount a common 
/home.

-- 
Dan Young <dyoung at mesd.k12.or.us>
Multnomah ESD - Technology Services
503-257-1562