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blake121666
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Joined: 21 Apr 2004
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Location: Catonsville, MD
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 Posted: Tue Jan 11, 2005 2:28 am Post subject: how should one setup X for fat heads? |
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What do you think is a good setup for graphically thin machines exporting displays to graphically fat machines in X? For instance, one of my main servers is a Cyrix P200+ w/128 MB RAM and a crappy old video card whereas my client machines are big fat 2.8 GHz machines w/1 GB RAM and super-duper accelerated cards.
The problem is that running X on the underpowered server nearly kills it but the fat clients have no problem at all running X. Shouldn't there be some way to keep the server's requirements minimal like this? After all this is a pretty typical situation. How should one set things up so that most cpu, ram, ... etc is used on the head and not the tail as appears to be the case for me.
Just naively thinking about it, it would seem to me that the client-server negotiation should be such that the head says to the tail something like "I'm a big fat head, don't calculate anything, just send me the goods" and the server would just send trivial primitives without having to think at all. That doesn't appear to be what's happening though. My server is limited in what it can provide if it has to spin cycles on video crap that the head is better suited to deal with.
Do I have it all wrong in my reasoning here? What should I do to set things up as I want them (as described above)?
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blake121666
Tux's lil' helper
Joined: 21 Apr 2004
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Location: Catonsville, MD
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| Posted: Tue Jan 11, 2005 4:00 am Post subject: |
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I've been mulling this over and think I've come up with a solution. I'll install the main server software (such as Lotus Domino) on the main server from a fat head machine (using whatever ... maybe NFS or something). The server software will think it's doing everything locally, but all data (as well as the server software) will be accessed from, say, NFS. Therefore X will think it is being run locally from each machine and the only load on the server will be network access to storage. This might be a better solution than exported X in the final analysis.
Has anyone done this?
Even though I've migrated most functionality of the old server to a more capable AMD Sempron 2800+ machine, it still irks me how much CPU and RAM X takes from the server. I'm going to dive into experimenting with the above scheme tomorrow. I can't help but think that my X setup is somehow wrong in the first place though ... Why the server machine (X client) would be so compute intensive boggles my mind.
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Daredevil
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Joined: 29 Jun 2003
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| Posted: Tue Jan 11, 2005 5:15 am Post subject: |
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Sounds like you're doing something very similar to LTSP Check out their site for some fantastic documentation on how to do this.
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Bob P
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Joined: 20 Oct 2004
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Location: Jackass! Development Labs
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| Posted: Tue Jan 11, 2005 6:02 am Post subject: Re: how should one setup X for fat heads? |
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| blake121666 wrote: | What do you think is a good setup for graphically thin machines exporting displays to graphically fat machines in X? For instance, one of my main servers is a Cyrix P200+ w/128 MB RAM and a crappy old video card whereas my client machines are big fat 2.8 GHz machines w/1 GB RAM and super-duper accelerated cards.
The problem is that running X on the underpowered server nearly kills it but the fat clients have no problem at all running X. |
the textbook way to solve this problem is to use an X server and thin clients. you didn't mention what kind of server your P200 was. in your case, you're using your slow PC as a file server, right?
using an older PC is fine as a file server, as most modern HD systems are going to be faster than your typical network bottleneck. but you have to look at things differently when you're talking about X.
an X server is typically a computationally fast machine on which all of the clients run their apps. the clients, in turn, are thin -- essentially they're just KB and monitor, while the "meat" of the processing for X gets done on the X server.
the X server and thin-client paradigm works great as long as you're not doing computationally intensive graphics. for games, its not going to work well as you ultimately rely on the video card attached to the monitor for graphics rendering. but for general windowing type of stuff, it works great.
i may be confused by your question, but it sounds like you want to run complex programs on a slow PC, and dump the graphics to a faster PC. that approach doesn't seem to fit the mold.
hth.
PS - daredevil, nice link. 
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blake121666
Tux's lil' helper
Joined: 21 Apr 2004
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Location: Catonsville, MD
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| Posted: Tue Jan 11, 2005 6:46 am Post subject: Re: how should one setup X for fat heads? |
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| Bob P wrote: |
an X server is typically a computationally fast machine on which all of the clients run their apps. the clients, in turn, are thin -- essentially they're just KB and monitor, while the "meat" of the processing for X gets done on the X server.
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Well, this is the semantic problem I have with the whole scheme. By my logic, the client machines *are* the Xservers serving up graphics capabilities that my server machine complies with (not dictates). So, in a sense, I guess I really want a fileserver after all. I want my main repository to be essentially a dumb server that services any client that connects to it and if that client happens to have kick-a** graphics capability it should be able to simply tell it the graphical commands it requires. Similar to what a webserver does - it just spits out web pages, the client does whatever it will with it ... simple functionality, not much computation necessary.
I'll use Domino as the example for this. Exported domino server eats up all resources on the server (X client). But if the logic were sane, it would just give the head what it needs and compute essentially nothing. For troubleshooting I would of course want the capability to run the Domino server self-containedly on the particular server machine; but never as a matter of course. My client machines are fatter than my servers and should take all of the heavy processing. This is the sane logical viewpoint in my estimate. So I guess I want to think "fileserver" and not "Xserver" as you've pointed out.
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Eskarel
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Joined: 07 May 2004
Posts: 257
Location: Perth Australia
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| Posted: Tue Jan 11, 2005 6:58 am Post subject: |
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| Problem is X doesn't really work that way, X provides a remote terminal to a running version, so graphically you may be ok, but computationally the X server is doing the running. You're essentially logging into the server remotely, you'll share all the resources amongst everyone connected and if you can't run the system on the machine single user you're really up a creek. |
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disappearer
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Joined: 11 Apr 2004
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| Posted: Tue Jan 11, 2005 8:20 am Post subject: |
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I may not understand the problem correctly but
1. X itself does not kill any 486+ machine. That's why LTSP works so well with older terminals. It's the X applications that cause the load.
2. What do you need X for on a server that is not an LTSP application server?
3. What you need is a more useful client-server scheme, so that the bare server listens for commands and you have a bloated eye-candy gui client that is started on your fat machine and communicates to the server.
May I ask what kind of server is running as an X app? |
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blake121666
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Joined: 21 Apr 2004
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Location: Catonsville, MD
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| Posted: Tue Jan 11, 2005 9:17 am Post subject: |
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w/o sounding too trollish, what i need is for X apps to work with a minimal server. Obvious requirement, no solution. I'm migrating away from windows and I need the X-based apps to have a small footprint on the server, how they behave on the client I couldn't particularly care less as long as they work. In my mind, the deal with client/server is for clients to get what they want from an administered central machine that will be fault-tolerant and in a word "administered". This X crap is not that. It runs the application and the client doesn't participate. This is stupid in 2005 ... was stupid in 1995 ... was stupid in ... etc. X should be replaced as a standard. The most basic of devices has more power than an X server will delegate. X isn't even suited for a toaster client/server-wise.
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