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On Thu, Oct 13, 2005 at 07:38:17PM +0200, Joern Clausen wrote:
> Does anyone has any figures on performance of a mid-sized network of
> diskless clients? If I have 20-30 modern PCs (lots of RAM, local swap
> partition might be possible), is a single, equally modern PC sufficient
> as boot and file server (client roots, maybe swaps, shared /usr)? How
> many clients are possible/reasonable? Or is the potential bottleneck the
> network itself?

The PC itself would probably be fine. I'd worry about concurrency and
seek contention on the disk as the first bottleneck, and the network
as the second.

For general-purpose workstations, perceptible slowness/performance
issues are likely to be around latency and response time to requests,
mostly in the disk queue, rather than raw throughput. If you have
problems in that department, a gig-E port or two, perhaps with agr(4)
or by dividing the clients among server nics, will quickly get you
back to the disk limits again.  If the pc's are all loading and
running the same apps, and those don't generate lots of output, you're
unlikely to hit either problem.

--
Dan.



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