Some Advice needed on cloning a Server

[Gavin McCullagh]

Hi,

On Tue, 02 Oct 2007, jbarry wrote:

> On 10/2/07, Gavin McCullagh <gmccullagh at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > Did you try re-running with sound turned off on a thin client?
> 
> Yup I did that and set the resolution to 640x480, music off, effects off.
> 
> I was able to launch 15 clients but the last two would not be
> responsive after I set the options I could no longer click the OK
> button. Viewing xrestop it show just 6K of memory being used by
> gcompris

So, was that better than usual or do you think it made no difference?  I'm
just trying to get my head around what is causing the problem.

Did you turn the sound off in gcompris, or in the thin client settings in
lts.conf?  Either might have an effect.

> Thou my result are a little optimistic since no one is using the
> clients they are just sitting there running gcompris and waiting for
> input, I see tomorrow when I'll let the students use them and I'll
> report back here.

That would be good know.

> Also I'm confused watching htop on the server it shows each client's
> gcompris consuming about 30% cpu each without doing anything, multiply
> that by 15 and that would be way beyond 100% which should be
> impossible.

If you have two dual core cpus, that's four cores which would allow up to
about 13 clients to go at 30%, in principal at least.  I wouldn't
necessarily expect to add them all up to exactly 100%, even with 1 core --
though they shouldn't be a long way off.

I've just run gcompris here (using feisty amd64 on dual core amd64 desktop)
and it seems to use fairly limited CPU time (<10%) when I don't touch it.
It does spike quite heavily though (to about 30%) when I interact with it.

X's cpu usage also seems quite heavy, though in your case it would be the
thin clients which would bear that load.

> The main problem now is that gcompris is eating CPU time even when it
> is not doing anything.

That does seem undesirable alright :-)

Gavin