On Wed, Aug 25, 2004 at 03:10:54PM +0300, Oron Peled wrote: > On Wednesday 25 August 2004 14:21, Yedidyah Bar-David wrote: > > This is exactly what I understood. But you do share the server. Would > > you recommend to David to give 10 people, that used to work on 10 > > machines, with 10 CPUs and 10*nMB RAM, share one machine, even a bit > > more powerful? I don't think so. > > That depends. If he already has 10 powerfull workstations with > local disks, than using them as thin-clients is a waste of resources > and your idea may be better. However, if you have 10 old PC's > (e.g: I use old diskless Celleron-300Mz) than there isn't much point > in trying to use their CPU+ram other than driving the display.
Yes, I am not talking about a theoretical place, but about the OP, David, who said they run heavy things on the machines (CPU and IO). > > Note that if the 10 users are running "average" mix of CPU+I/O > jobs (interactive applications) than hosting them on a single > powerfull server would give better performance per dollar than > buying each his own "thick" client (this is obviously due to > the fact that CPU and I/O resources are multiplexed). I agree generally, but sadly things are getting worse over time. In the past most Unix applications were designed to not hog the machine, with the assumption it might be multiuser. Today you can leave in one of your virtual desktops a browser that is on a page that does fast screen updates (e.g. flash or javascript) and wastes a lot of CPU. With a single user machine it's less noticable than with 5-10 users. Of course, you can work around this with e.g. a script that will renice mozilla, but it can still be a problem. > > Where does the theory in the previous paragraph fail? When the > large computer isn't anymore a commodity computer (something > that you cannot buy at the local computer store, so its price > is jumping high). But a current comodity high end PC (e.g: > a P4-3Ghz, 2GB ram) can easily host 4-5 desktop users with > reasonable performance (ok, add another 1Gb if they all use > openoffice :-) I agree. Soon atholn64 with 8GB :-) > > > Do you use nbd? Which version? I tried once to play with enbd, and it > > took quite some time to make it work and then it was very slow. Care > > to share your experience? > > I only played with it, just like you. I didn't even bother looking at > performance since my goal wasn't a disk (why would I want a disk on > a thin client? better have it on the server). I wanted to use > it so the local floppy + cdrom would be remoted to the server... Yes, I thought of it for a poor man's network RAID. > > > > The missing pieces (IMO): > > > - Handling removable media (haven't found a way to handle > > > this via nbd). > > > > And did you search for one? Not that I critisize - on the contrary. > > No I didn't (no time), any pointers would be appreciated, thanks. I did give at least two - vold (apt-get or google) and hotplug. udev, based on hotplug, is about to replace devfs, and if it's good as I hope it is, it will also make what you want easy. -- Didi ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
