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Poettering: The Most Awesome, Least-Advertised Fedora 17 FeaturePoettering: The Most Awesome, Least-Advertised Fedora 17 FeaturePosted May 3, 2012 7:19 UTC (Thu) by geuder (subscriber, #62854)In reply to: Poettering: The Most Awesome, Least-Advertised Fedora 17 Feature by dlang Parent article: Poettering: The Most Awesome, Least-Advertised Fedora 17 Feature
> no, you put one computer at each group of desks with one computer in the
> middle and 4+ people sitting around it.
From an administrators point of view I'd prefer to have one server for the whole classroom (Yeah, it's also a single point of failure, but I don't think that's a major issue.)
Disclaimer: I haven't been involved in buying such hardware for a long time, so I'm not sure whether 4-5 small servers are less expensive than 1 equivalent one.
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Poettering: The Most Awesome, Least-Advertised Fedora 17 Feature Posted May 3, 2012 8:38 UTC (Thu) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
how much memory are you expecting to give each person?
nowdays 2G per person doesn't cut it, 4G can be tight.
While you can stuff huge amounts of ram in a super powerful server, you end up paying a very significant price premium for the density. you can generally get 2-3x the total ram and clock cycles if you drop from the very top end down to the commodity level.
Not to mention that with several smaller systems you can then use cheap display/keyboard connections (that are limited to short distances) as opposed to paying the much higher costs for ones that go longer distances.
besides, if you have one server for the whole classroom, when that server has problems, everything stops. If you have a dozen machines instead and one fails, it has far less impact (and you may even be able to afford a spare :-)
Poettering: The Most Awesome, Least-Advertised Fedora 17 Feature Posted May 3, 2012 9:20 UTC (Thu) by BlueLightning (subscriber, #38978) [Link]
> nowdays 2G per person doesn't cut it, 4G can be tight.
Surely that depends entirely on what you're doing with the machine. As I sit here I'm only using 1.1GB of the 4GB my machine has and that's a KDE desktop with a browser (11 tabs open), email client, text editor and console with multiple tabs running as well as a bunch of daemons in the background. Not to mention that in a multi-seat situation some of that would be common and some of it would be able to be shared between users as well.
Poettering: The Most Awesome, Least-Advertised Fedora 17 Feature Posted May 3, 2012 10:46 UTC (Thu) by geuder (subscriber, #62854) [Link]
> nowdays 2G per person doesn't cut it, 4G can be tight.
What are you doing?
I type this comment on a 512 MB machine. It runs a full Kubuntu (KDE not being known to be the most lightweight) and normal web browsing and text editing just work fine. LibreOffice brings the machine to swap a bit too much admittedly. Not that I would really be forced to use it, but IBM T40 is just a nice museum hardware and the small memory does not really disturb me.
On my work machines I have 4 GB and I hardly remember them swapping. Well, if I run 3 or more virtual machines I can feel memory getting short.
So for most classrooms 768 MB - 1 GB per user should be more than enough. Unless they compile Qt or do 3D modeling of course...
> If you have a dozen machines instead and one fails, it has far less impact
True for you and me, because we could start hacking around. However, not an option in many schools. There you pay extra for each administration job.
Poettering: The Most Awesome, Least-Advertised Fedora 17 Feature Posted May 6, 2012 14:33 UTC (Sun) by salimma (subscriber, #34460) [Link]
Remember that the users are actually running on a single OS instance. So shared libraries etc. are amortized across all users -- and I'm betting that, in a lab setting, the sysadmins would restrict users to running a single desktop if memory constraints really become problematic.
Now, if they all open 30+ tabs in Firefox... *shudder*
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