thin client or stand alone - which is better?

[Jim Hutchinson]

On Jan 29, 2008 1:24 PM, Gavin McCullagh <gmccullagh at gmail.com> wrote:
> If it's really one room, I presume your thin clients are connected to the
> thin client server through a single switch.  This should be ideal.  You
> just get a 100Mb/sec switch with a couple of 1Gb/sec ports.  Plug the
> server into the 1Gb (using a decent Cat5E cable and a 1Gb/sec card on the
> server) port and the others into 100Mbit/sec ports.  If network bandwidth
> is really running out, this should improve your situation substantially.

Yes, we have one server connected to our network and all the clients
connected to the sever via a switch. The server has gigbit but not the
switches and maybe not our upstream network switches. I'll have to run
this option by our network people and see if it's doable. Thanks for
the info.

>
> Are you sure network bandwidth is the issue though?  What makes you think
> that?  If you have a little time I'd really recommend installing munin.
> It's fantastically useful for diagnosing bottlenecks in machines.  Within a
> couple of days, you'll have useful data to diagnose your problem.  It's
> probably one of
>
>  - slow io access (disks)
>  - short of ram (swapping)
>  - short of cpu
>  - short of network bandwidth

I can't say I'm 100% certain it's network but I've watched the load on
the server and it doesn't seem to be that. It happens whenever
students are all using the internet. Could be firefox itself. I don't
know how to test if we are maxing bandwidth but with one 100MB line
coming in it seems likely.

I'll check out the munin tool.

Thanks,
Jim

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