[Thinlinc-technical] More users / Less servers

Tue Jul 21 18:03:25 CEST 2009

Hi Inge. Check my comments below. I´m skipping some of my original comments
to save space and parhaps encourage people to read the whole e-mail. =P

> This reached me through a slightly convoluted way, where Hans 
> forwarded your email to the support system.  Therefore the 
> somewhat late reply.  I will try to address some of your 
> points below. 
> 
OK. So I´m also copying it back to the list.

> Despite what you write below, my guess is that Firefox is the 
> main culprit here, even though 3.0 uses considerably less 
> memory than the previous versions.  Something that we have 
> done here with great success is to install a so called "flash 
> blocker".  This is a plugin that replaces all flash contents 
> with a "start" arrow. When the user presses the arrow he/she 
> can watch the contents, otherwise it takes no resources at 
> all.  So despite its name, it's not really a blocker, but it 
> will save lots of resources if the users access web sites 
> with lots of flash.  (The reason I think it's a villain even 
> though you say it's not, is that flash is (I think) executed 
> out of process, so it doesn't show in the firefox memory map.)
> 
Humm, that´s great! I´ll include this one on my desperate server´s resources
saving list.

> I think you can also shrink OpenOffice.org by disabling java, 
> which is not used in the word processing parts, but I'm no 
> expert here.
> 
Hey, it also sounds good, since Java is used just for some advanced
features. 
There are some information about it here:
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Java_and_OpenOffice.org

> You could always try to use another file manager, there are 
> less memory-hungry ones.  With todays XDG standards, even a 
> non-gnome one can be pretty well integrated into the desktop 
> although perhaps not *as* good.  Btw, have you tried LXFC?
> 
I´ve never heard about LXFC, and after some Googleing I found some old
references to it, what makes me think that it is not well supported by a
developers community... =(

BTW, I´m actually doing some tests using XFCE4.6 with good results. The
desktop environment is really cheap on resources consumption, and the
problems faced on 4.4 seem to be solved on this release.

> > 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...
> 
> Well, the load balancing already tries to give the user the 
> best server, so as long as you don't try to log on more users 
> than it can handle, you will get this by the default system.  
> If you really want to limit it, I guess that you could create 
> a small script that returns true or false, and then call that 
> from the profiles in tl-select profile.  If it returns false 
> for all profiles, then the user will be denied. :-)
> 
Yep, that´s right. I´ll try that.

Rgds.

--
Marcos S. Trazzini
ThinLinc Technical Manager
Avancera Brazil IT Services Ltda
Al Caiapós, 465 - Alphaville
Barueri - SP - Brazil
Cel +55 (11) 9941-0773
Tel +55 (11) 3522-8570
marcos.trazzini at avancera.com.br
http://www.avancera.com.br/

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