Thanks all for weighing in. I didn't know about the role of caching for root file system (i.e. /) in LTSP but it makes complete sense why /home should get the ssd love not the root which I had supposed. I'm now questioning if the 4 gigs of RAM that I used for the "teacher computer" in my classroom was enough. Any sense of amount of RAM that would mostly avoid this bottleneck? Let's say one was running 14.04 Ubuntu.
The dm-cache sounds the most eloquent solution but is beyond my tech knowledge/resources so using the SSD for /home seems like the way to go. If I can't get any SSD's, is there any reason to use 2 standard HD's in some format such as a RAID or dividing off the /home partition? Our teacher computers will be i5's with space for at least 2 HD's. BTW, here's a nice 2014 TEDx presentation on Libre software by Richard Stallman--probably some have already seen it: http://teemuleinonen.fi/2015/06/09/why-freelibreopen-source-in-learning-is-important/ . On Thu, Jun 11, 2015 at 2:20 AM Veli-Matti Lintu < veli-matti.li...@opinsys.fi> wrote: > 2015-06-11 8:03 GMT+03:00 Alkis Georgopoulos <alk...@gmail.com>: > >> On 10/06/2015 05:31 μμ, David Groos wrote: >> >>> Thanks Alkis for this information! >>> >>> Questions: >>> --I could put 2 hard drives on the classroom server and install the >>> system on one HD and /home on another HD. Seems like that would >>> significantly improve performance during those times when some clients >>> were booting and others were logging in, but that's just an idea. Your >>> guess/knowledge on this? >>> >> >> The root file system (/) doesn't matter much as it's aggressively cached >> in RAM, provided of course that your server does have enough RAM. >> But it's nice to put /home in an SSD, since many users need write access >> there in parallel. I have no benchmarks about that yet though. > > > It's also possible to use SSD as a cache layer for a normal spinning drive > using dm-cache (or bcache, etc.). dm-cache has worked well for us on /home > partitions. Writes are fast and most of the user data seems to sit there > unused, so also most reads are fast. > > In our case we have home partition on LVM and SSD drive is used as a cache > layer. Those are then combined to cached-home device that is mounted as > /home. We wrote some tools to manage the dm-cache partitions ( > https://github.com/opinsys/dmcache-utils), but I've understood that > there's now also lvmcache. > > > Veli-Matti > -- > edubuntu-users mailing list > edubuntu-users@lists.ubuntu.com > Modify settings or unsubscribe at: > https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/edubuntu-users >
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