Thin Clients

[Rashkae]

Mark Haney wrote:
> Rashkae wrote:
>> Wade Smart wrote:
>>> 20081007 1112 GMT-6
>>>
>>> A school system local to me asked about the possibility of moving to 
>>> linux. Of course I talked that up right away. But then this older bloke 
>>> asked about setting up Thin Clients at each school and linking the 
>>> server from each school to the main server. I thought about it (on the 
>>> spot of course) and while it sounds good in theory, I personally dont 
>>> know if that would work OR if the overall benefits pan out.
>>>
>> It works really well and the benefits are great.
> 
> This I do agree with.  When you have a well designed system with lots of 
> leeway for those sudden spikes.
> 
>> Now, to run full desktop environments, you will need more than a few
>> application servers.  If using commodity hardware (as opposed to dual
>> Xeon with over 20GB of ram), You'll probably only want 10 to 20 clients
>> per application server.
> 
> Again, agreed.  However, you can put more clients on the newer hardware, 
> even commodity, as long as you think of a basic metric I've used before. 
>   each user will consume approximately 10% CPU and about 300-1000MB RAM 
> (RAM is the biggest unknown most of the time, better to over guess than 
> under).  Most thin clients will be on the bottom end of that, but like 
> anything the more RAM you have the better.  I would be willing you bet 
> you could get 40-50 clients on a dual core with 10+GB RAM, although a 
> quad core would obviously have more 'give' to it.

RAM is the big issue here.. .Last I checked,, commodity mobo's all top
out at 8GB... I'm not so worried about CPU,, even with CPU intensive
processes, Linux multitasking can still provide a smooth interactive
environment with maxed out CPU's