slow thin client

[Charles Honton]

I've got a school lab setup with 24 thin clients going against a single 
lab computer.  I'm using the LTSP Muecow as outlined in the edubuntu 
wiki.  This summer, when I was testing it, there were no problems.  Once 
I got a classroom full of kids, the response time was incredibly slow.

To narrow down the problem I used top, vmstat, and bwm-ng.  I 
immediately found a swapping issue.  So I upgraded the Ram from 1G to 
3G.  If anything, the problem seems even worse.  Now, I don't have any 
swapping but CPU utilization is @ 80% us 10% sy and network bandwidth is 
8Kb/sec.  I'm guessing the issue is I just don't have enough horsepower 
to run the number of users I have.
Do you concur?
How many clients should I be able to run?
Any ideas on how to increase response time?

How easy would it be to move processing  to the local clients?

thanks,
chas