Graphics card for multiple simultaneous users

[Fred Roller]

Brian McKee wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 9, 2010 at 7:04 PM, Felix Oxley <felix.oxley at gmail.com> 
> wrote:
>> My current query is how the graphics subsystem driver & hardware etc
>> will handle multiple users simultaneously trying to watch YouTube or
>> BBC iPlayer?
>> (50 users total, say 20 (max) concurrent at lunchtime)
>>
>> Will this be possible? What sort of graphics card should I use? Free
>> or proprietary driver? More than 1 graphics card in machine?
>> (I was thinking of getting a new Dell server with dual quad  core (16
>> threads) Xeon 2.8GHz processor, 24GB ram )
>>
>
> I don't have any reasonable guesses as to how much horsepower will be 
> required - I would think the LTSP or Edubuntu people would have good 
> data on that - poke around their site or inquire on their mailing list 
> for real world experience.
>
> I would point out however that the server wouldn't need a video card 
> at all to do this...
>
> Brian
Last time I played with this scenario our count was 25ish simultanious 
126Mb RAM virtual machines on a single quad core 8Gb server.  We used NX 
server as it (at the time) had the best performance.  When the clients' 
NX client logged in, server fired the specific application and when the 
apt closed so did the session.  One of the benefits is snapshots to a 
clean system which was cronned for late night.

This one can be done several ways and shouldn't take long to come up 
with an acceptable solution to meet your basic needs.  From there you 
can tweek to needs.  What is the impact to your bandwidth and will the 
server's nic handle the incoming/outgoing traffic.  If youtube is 
pulling 100k*20 user's=2Mb then turn the video back out to the screen of 
the recipient.  You may need to think about a second nic as well, we 
did; one facing out and one facing in.  Help to secure the server as well.

Personally, seems like a lot of expense and trouble to let employees 
watch TV.

.02

-- 
Fred
www.fwrgallery.com

"Life is like linux, simple.  If you are fighting it you are doing something wrong."