On 2/7/11 11:59 AM, Thomas Scofield wrote:
I've spent the last couple of hours frustrated at trying to log in
and use notebooks at sagenb.org. I was attempting to do this while
teaching a class, and had little to no success between 10:30 and
12:20 EST (U.S.). I had this same experience about a month ago when
teaching a different class---probably can write off 75 students or
thereabouts as having seen enough frustration in an hour to never
want to use Sage again.
Nevertheless, I've found remarkably few (given my 2-for-2 batting
average) messages like this in the list archives over the last year.
Is this not a problem for others, just me doing something wrong? If
so, can someone help me diagnose the problem? If it's a consistent
problem that everyone else has become so accustomed to that we just
don't speak of it anymore, then how can it be addressed? I'd suggest
to my students that they should all download a copy if it weren't
that so many of them are Windows users, and that looks to be
oppressively hard. If I could convince the IT people at my
institution to run a notebook server, what could I tell them about
numbers and power? Just what are the specs on existing sagenb
servers, and how many users before you notice poor performance?
I too have noticed sagenb.org being slow or down quite a bit recently.
My personal work-around has been to use demo.sagenb.org or our school
Sage server for my classes. We have a Dell PowerEdge 2900 server (i.e.,
probably 5-6 years old) with 16 gig of RAM, and I have noticed no
problems serving my classes (3 classes, probably 80 students total). We
probably don't need that much RAM to serve just these students, but we
also use the server for research work. You can see instructions from
our setup here: http://wiki.sagemath.org/SageServer.
My guess is that about 50-60 simultaneous users (not accounts, but
simultaneous users) is enough to cause a severe slowdown to sagenb.org.
That's a guess, though; I'm not sure what the actual number is.
As for the future:
In January, we held a Sage conference in which many people worked on
designing a much more scalable notebook. I am working with a group of
students on the first steps of this rewrite.
There are other people also working on this rewrite or other projects
which restructure the notebook and make it more scalable. There is
funding from an NSF grant to work on making the notebook more scalable,
so it will get done (i.e., there's funding and committed developer
time). One project (the rewrite to use flask) is at the testing stage,
so hopefully we will see it go into Sage soon.
Thanks,
Jason
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