City of Largo, Florida w/ 400 Linux + KDE Thin Clients

[Warren Togami]

That was a sarcastic remark.  230 users is great for that amount of memory,
but if you read the fine print they are cheating a little.

"All of the icons do a 'rsh' to other systems and then start up
the various software packages that we have in the City."

This means that they had larger software like WordPerfect Office on other
servers, and they would run it seemlessly due to X's native network
integration.  Software can be running on multiple servers, and the user
can't tell a difference.  This is actually a very good idea, and something I
had completely forgotten about.  This leaves one server to handle all the
KDE and window manager resources, while other servers do the heavy
processing in application software.  Very scalable and cost effective
solution when you have many users that expect good performance and
responsiveness.

I disagree regarding KDE vs other desktop environments.  When you have a
large, shared system like this, the resource usage is much lower than you
would think.  Due to shared memory and cache between the many sessions, the
amount of resources (memory) per user ratio becomes tolerably low due.  I am
a firm believer that the "familiar" desktop experience of KDE and Gnome are
powerful and necesssary for a migration path, because end-users will refuse
to adopt desktop Linux without it.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Dusty" <dusty at sandust.com>
To: "Linux & Unix Advocates & Users" <luau at list.luau.hi.net>
Sent: Wednesday, August 01, 2001 12:50 PM
Subject: [luau] Re: City of Largo, Florida w/ 400 Linux + KDE Thin Clients


> Warren is serious.  The city of Largo is getting GOOD performance with
200+ users on one server.  The server has 3GB of ram and dual 933mhz PIII.
They are only using 8 bit color (256 colors).  The cpu load is very low,
70-95% idle.  Sounds like memory is the what is really needed.  I would
think Largo would get better performance with a different desktop/window
manager.  KDE uses too many resources, but it seems to be working great.
>
> Dusty
>
> -----------------------------------------------
> >
> > I am not used to large multi-user systems, not sure if your comment
> > is serious or if you're joking -- what kind of performance is this in
> > real-world terms? Good? Bad? Indifferent?
> >
> > Is this an Intel machine, or a mini- or main-frame type archetecture?
> >
> > Aloha,
> >
> > Rob