[Thinlinc-technical] More users / Less servers

[Peter Åstrand]

Hi, see comments inline.

> Actually, I´ve made some calculations based on user´s memory usage on a real
> server (at UERJ) running GNOME 2.26, Firefox 3.0 and OpenOffice 2.4, and
> than I  realized that each user consumes from 250 to 350MB of RAM
> (consolidating all processes resident set size, RSS), exactly like you
...
> I could see that GNOME is the great villain here, since it starts a lot of

Yes, this is quite much. It's a little bit funny, because the other day I 
was talking to a person which claimed that his GNOME desktops only 
consumed 74 MiB per user, considerably less than our estimation of 
100-150MiB.

If you consider VDI installations, especially with Windows Vista or 7, 
then 1 or 2 GiB per concurrent user is more typical.

It's clear that there is no such thing as a "standard" desktop; your 
mileage may vary...


> 3) Makes ThinLinc server´s "smarter", to avoid high-memory consumption: The
> idea here is simple, I want to avoid creating more sessions than the server
> can handle. I had some ideas that I would like to share with you. For
> example, perhaps if we, based on the user´s pre-defined memory consumption
> (like 250MB per user), define that the server could handle 15 sessions, we
> could create a way to count down how many sessions are already opened and
> deny opening new sessions according to the pre-defined "max-sessions"
> limit...

This is an interesting idea. We can consider this for future versions. It 
should also be possible to create a simple script that simply stops the 
"vsmagent" service if the load is considered too high (and restarts if 
when the load is lighter).



> Please let me know if any of my ideas makes sense for you, or even if you
> are already making efforts on this area acually.

Well, not really, I guess it matters where you live in the world, but here 
in Sweden, I don't consider the memory prices very high. For example, if 
you purchase a Dell R710 server, you can upgrade the RAM from 4 GiB to 12 
GiB for only ~$300. Assuming GNOME sessions of 300 MiB each, this 
corresponds to 40 sessions, or $7.5 per concurrent user. This is much less 
than the costs associated with software licenses. For example, the 
ThinLinc subscription currently costs $75 per concurrent user.


Best regards, 
---
Peter Åstrand		ThinLinc Chief Developer
Cendio AB		http://www.cendio.com
Wallenbergs gata 4
583 30 Linköping	Phone: +46-13-21 46 00