El mié, 12-08-2009 a las 11:58 +0900, nigel barker escribió: > Dear All, > I have a hardware question. (Remember I have been having bad luck with > performance of ltsp servers, and Jose suggested the NIC is the bottleneck) > > I need an LTSPserver for a room of 20 thin clients. > > I can get a dual core xeon for the same price as a core 2 quad/phenomII x4 > (same RAM, pcie x16 slot, Gbps onboard). Is it better to get the xeon, or > better to get more cores? According to what a couple of Intel technician told me: xeon internal arch is exactly the same as other Intel microprocessors. The reason why xeon might be better is because the chipset of the mainboards are usually better optimized for serving purposes. I'd go for the 2 quad as it's probably faster and newer than the xeon. On the other hand, you must check that the Gbps on board is not connected to a standard PCI bus, but to a PCI Express x4 bus. Otherwise, it never will give you 1 Gbps. > > Alternatively, I can get core 2 duo or athlon 64 x2 for half the price. Is > that a bargain or false economy? Or would you get two of these instead of > one of the above? 2 core 2 duo is better than 1 quad core if the rest of the features for the machine are the same. Anyway, setting up two servers will make you consume more electricity, more time to get them working, and have 2 switches or creating VLAN in the switch. > > Then what NIC do I need? is x1 too slow? I have a 24 port Gbps switch. x1 is too slow for sure, as it won't get 1 GBps but 400 Mbps[1] (my measurements gave me peaks of 34 Mbps in the clients when booting and when serving some big OO Impress presentations, so 34 X 20= 680 Mbps are needed in your case). On the other hand, you only need 1 Gbps in the link between the server and the switch. That's the real bottleneck. For the thin clients 100 Mbps is more than enough. > > I am thinking 4G of RAM is enough. Do you agree? > My ltsp servers have 8 Gb of RAM, but in the six months that they've been in production , the monitoring tools have revealed that never used more than 3 Gb. Anyway, up to now, I have only 15 clients per server (but we dimensioned them thinking in having up to 30 in the future) My 20 cents Regards. José L. [1] http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/abstracts/tips0456.html
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