[H-GEN] Diskless boxes for internet access

[Martin Pool]

On Fri, 9 Jan 1998, Robert Brockway wrote:

> On Fri, 9 Jan 1998, Steve Pinel wrote:
> 
> > Also, anyone know about the 8Mb RAM and X/Netscape issue?  Will it be
> > adequate?  Is anyone buying any more 4Mb 30 pin RAM modules, as has been
> > happening for some time now?

> One alternative that comes to mind is QNX.  It is commercial but I'd be
> surprised if they didn't give a school a good deal.

QNX is v.cool.  They have some kind of "free for educational purposes"
license, but unless you can convince them that your kiddies are actually
studying realtime systems they may not give you that price.

> You could setup each of the 386 boxen as xterms as you know, and then
> display Netscape from a central server.  This won't be as bad on the
> server as it might first sound.  Linux uses 'copy on write' for its memory
> pages. 

Yes, but: most of the Netscape stuff will be dirty, not shareable.  In
fact, running Netscape 4.04 browser-only on RH5 with one window open
showing a mid-size page,

slut$ cat /proc/29694/status

Name:   netscape
State:  S (sleeping)
Pid:    29694
PPid:   1
Uid:    500     500     500     500
Gid:    500     500     500     500
VmSize:    12220 kB
VmLck:         0 kB
VmRSS:      9040 kB
VmData:     4584 kB
VmStk:        24 kB
VmExe:      4888 kB
VmLib:      1668 kB 
[...]

So, 9MB resident, 4.5MB non-shareable data, and 6.4MB shareable exe and
libs.  (The numbers don't add up because not all of the text is resident.)

I imagine running Java would push these numbers up a bit.

NS4.04 is remarkably stable on Linux: it's crashed once in the last few
weeks, which is much better than it does on Luz95.

> So, one app (Netscape in this case) being run many times will
> largely use the same memory for each process.  A server with 32mb or
> preferably 64mb and reasonable grunt could easily handle many xterminals.

I'd say, figure on about (32 + 8n) MB to run n Netscape sessions.
<std-disclaimer>

--
Martin Pool

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