From lboncek at twcny.rr.com Wed Feb 16 06:11:16 2005 From: lboncek at twcny.rr.com (Lou Boncek) Date: Wed Feb 16 06:11:50 2005 Subject: [X-Servers] 700 Users all hitting the server at the same time! Message-ID: We have a unique situation. In one building, for the next 13 weeks, 3 days a week, for a two hour time slot, we have about 700 users all hitting the server within minutes of each other. Because of class scheduling, we can not change this. We do NOT have a one-to-one deployment. A student does NOT sit at the same computer every day. Our set up is, iBooks (most wireless) and eMacs (100mb wired), which authenticate against an LDAP server (that part works without a glitch), but then, we have Networked Home Directories. At this point - because so many people are hitting the server at the same time, we get the spinning beach ball of death and time-outs. This is a G4 Xserve, with 2Gig RAM. We dedicated the OS on Drive one, and Storage on Drive two. Which works for us fine all other times. We know one solution would be to add another server and divide the load. We also know in mid-year this is extra work, for a unique situation that will be over in 13 weeks. If we had a one-to-one deployment, then we could cache locally, etc. But again, this is not an option. Same problem would happen creating managed Mobile accounts on some of them. The students might not transfer their documents from the local to the networked home, etc. Does anyone have a thought or solutions? Thanks.... Lou Boncek Computer Support Liverpool Central School District Liverpool, NY 13090 Lou_Boncek@liverpool.k12.ny.us From adamsp at cs.umb.edu Wed Feb 16 06:57:34 2005 From: adamsp at cs.umb.edu (Peter C.S. Adams) Date: Wed Feb 16 07:04:39 2005 Subject: [X-Servers] 700 Users all hitting the server at the same time! In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Thus spake Lou Boncek , circa 2/16/2005 9:11 AM: > We know one solution would be to add another server and divide the > load. That may be your only solution. When we spec'ed our Xserve, we were told our dual-2GHz with 2 GB of RAM would be fine for about 200 users. You didn't mention OS -- Panther does networked home directories better than Jaguar -- but I suspect 700 users at a time using home directories is just too much for any one server. peter From caranzazu at union-city.k12.nj.us Fri Feb 18 09:30:18 2005 From: caranzazu at union-city.k12.nj.us (Aranzazu) Date: Fri Feb 18 09:30:14 2005 Subject: [X-Servers] 700 Users all hitting the server at the same time! In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: >Does anyone have a thought or solutions? Thanks.... I have had the same problem in the past. what was causeing the slowdown was two things. 1. jaguar is slow. when we upgraded to panther a lot of our beach ball and drooped connections fixed it's self. 2. we have about 40 ibooks connecting to out server and we found that they are the ones that are slowing down out server. we had to do alot of load balancing on our airports to resolve a lot of this. If you email me off list i can give you specifics. -- From Aranzazu This message has been scanned for virus detection by the Union City School's email system. Un-cleanable attachments have been deleted and the sender notified.