Best way(s) to speed up lab?

[Harry Sweet]

Hi all;

Going into the year, I hope to be able to solve workstation lagging problems once and for all.  I'm not sure where
the bottleneck is as no swapping happens, and network thruput looks ok.  But I often get lagging when a full class is on.

9.04 64 bit Ubuntu

Server = intel quad core, 8 gig ram, SATA drive, server box has a gigibit ethernet but the switch is 100.
It also runs the classes web server, very lightly used and along with that Mysql, again not very busy and not used at
all in most classes.

20 Workstations are all 10 year old Ibm's, 256k ram.

Which of these things would likely improve performance the most?

1.  Reinstall the server version of Ubuntu  
2.  Lose the GUI on the server or at least drop Gnome for something faster
3.  Run Firefox as a local app
4.  Get a gigabit switch to replace our 10 year old 100meg switch.
5.  Raid or SCSI disks
6.. Something I haven't thought of .....


thanks

Harry Sweet
Goshen High School
Goshen, NY