Does the LTSP model actually scale?
Posted Oct 8, 2006 7:59 UTC (Sun) by
anton (guest, #25547)
In reply to:
Does LTSP actually work? by kbob
Parent article:
The future of the Linux Terminal Server Project (Linux.com)
Yes. We have been using X-terminals (not LTSP-based, but that does
not matter for answering this question) for 14 years. At the moment
we have about 25 X-Terminals for students, and right before deadlines
they all connect to one of the following two single-CPU machines: a
2.26GHz Pentium 4 with 2GB of RAM, or an 800MHz Alpha with 1GB of RAM
(slow by todays standards). In addition to the students on the
X-terminals, up to 60 students log into the machines from their homes
via ssh. The machines handle the load just fine, without significant
degradation of the user experience.
However, it depends on which software the users are using. Our
students mostly run an editor and compile and test their relatively
small programs now and then; no fancy Gnome and KDE applications. If
they used memory hogs, we would have to upgrade the RAM on the
machines; e.g., we upgraded the Pentium 4 from 1GB to 2GB when we
expected them to use Eclipse.
Most of our staff is also using X-terminals, using a wider range of
software (e.g., Mozilla, OpenOffice), but we don't concentrate as much
on one machine as the students.
There are some things that you just cannot do across the X-terminals,
like play some modern 3D game (although we did use the ACM flight
simulator with X-terminals a decade ago); not sure what else cannot be
done, because I never hit these limits.
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