freeze of thinclient - Re: Some trouble with fresh 7.10/ltsp - now fresh 7.04

[Gavin McCullagh]

Hi,

On Mon, 14 Jan 2008, Dirk wrote:

> myselve wrote:
> > I have now: fresh 7.04 amd64, no patches, no changes, working clients 
> > (1280x1024), console still unchangable 640x480
> >
> > Client freeze after 1,5 hour working (no mouse, nothing). Client working 
> > perfect with other servers. No syslog-messages.
> >   
> hmm, second freeze while opening the same 1,7MB-eMail with thunderbird 
> like the first time (Devon IT LT210). Has jpg, pdf and doc attached.
> No messages. ssh to the server is okay.
> 
> Tried second Client (FSC FUTRO A230). Didn't freeze while opening this 
> mail.

This sounds almost certainly to be the same issue we've discussed here
before, with firefox instead of thunderbird.

https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/edubuntu-users/2007-August/thread.html#1811

What happens is firefox (or in your case thunderbird) on the server sends a
shed load of image data to X on the thin client.  So much that X grows to
use all available memory on the thin client and the client crashes.  It
will help (if you can do it) to have extra memory in the thin client.

There are a couple of not too well developed workarounds discussed in the
thread.  One is a patch to firefox v3 (thunderbird would need a separate
fix).  The other is a "shim" file which can apparently limit the amount of
memory X will allocate.

https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/edubuntu-users/2007-December/003060.html

This is a difficult problem to fix I'm afraid.

Gavin