Lingering Users and Painfully Slow OpenOffice Startup

[R. Scott Belford]

After installing

http://www.morokeni.ch/edubuntu/gnome-watchdog_0.9.2_i386.deb

User's processes are now purged after they log out.  If they do not log 
out, however, and just reboot the terminal, their processes continue to 
run until they log in again.  At this point watchdog notes that they 
already have running pid's and resets the user.  This works, and the 
teacher observes that something similar was in place with the K12LTSP.

This is a pretty substantial bug, I believe.  The average user 
integrating Edubuntu into a thin-client lab and expecting it to perform 
reliably may not track down this fix.  Without gnome-watchdog, users who 
log out have processes that continue to run throughout the day.  On days 
when the teacher has 5 classes of 30 different students, the runaway 
processes get out of control.

I installed prelink yesterday, after classes, and I am hoping that this 
will improve performance.  I seem to recall Eric integrating this into 
the K12LTSP.  The few test clients I tried loaded it much faster.

Last, I have followed these suggestions

http://www.zolved.com/synapse/view_content/28209/How_to_make_OpenOffice_run_faster_in_Ubuntu

and they made a monumental difference on my home machines.  I'll test 
this in the lab next week.

Switching to a different window manager is not an option.  This teacher 
has been running the K12LTSP since before Fedora was created.  I am 
perpetually reminded that "it wasn't this way with the K12LTSP"  when 
things are not quite the same.  I am doing my best to figure out all the 
tweaks Eric H. and other integrated to make it great.

--scott




Fredrik Jansson wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> We've run edubuntu 7.10 about a week and we don't have any problems caused by
> OpenOffice. We have seen that OpenOffice and firefox, take time to
> load, but we have
> tracked the problem to gnome-panel and/or nautilus.
> 
> Because of that we have tried xfce4 and with xfce we got better performance.
> 
> Do anybody know how to set xfce4 as default for ldm? I've tried files
> like .xinitrc and
> .dmrc or similar.
> 
> Regards
> Fredrik Jansson, Forsmarks skola, Sweden
> 
> PS. Our server has 4Gb memory and 2 * 2.4 GHz Intel P4. We are about
> 30 users at a time. DS
> 
> On Nov 10, 2007 3:39 PM, Stefano Rivera
> <ubuntu-edubuntu-devel at rivera.za.net> wrote:
>> Hi R. (2007.11.10_02:05:04_+0200)
>>> I notice that, independent of OpenOffice, user processes continue running
>>> even after a logout.  It seems that this is the current hack, but is there
>>> something systemic that I can help track down?
>> We've seen this on an Ubuntu lab, too. They hog the CPU, and waste a
>> little RAM.
>>
>> SR
>>
>> --
>> Stefano Rivera
>>   http://rivera.za.net/
>>   H: +27 21 794 7937   C: +27 72 419 8559
>>
>>
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>