[desktop-discuss] Re: [appliances-discuss] Re: Article idea "Getting Small"?

[Gary A. Ross]

Everyone,

In the corporate environment, where I live, the trend for clients is to 
get "thinner". Not only in terms of remote displays (aka SunRay), but 
there is increasing pressure to significantly reduce support amd 
maintenance costs. The "ultra thin" devices are excellent for some admin 
personnel, and specific functionality, such as call centers. 
Unfortunately they fall short for the general population. As John Rice 
has said already, SunRay clients running “essential” applications such 
as streaming media, and browsing rich media content, can quickly crush a 
general purpose server, resulting in poor performance for everyone. We 
did a lot of testing last year, and our results confirmed these issues.

Corporations are looking at different concepts such as "thin PC's". 
These are desktop systems, but without any local disks. All data is 
gotten from from network devices. Applications are being streamed from 
servers, but are being executed on the local system, not running on a 
server like the SunRay model. This gives the user the resources of a 
powerful CPU, memory, and graphics subsystems, without many of the basic 
security and support issues found in systems today.

This isn't really new, as you well know. The concept of "diskless nodes" 
has been around the UNIX environment for decades, and has been tuned for 
many years. Applications in this environment have been designed from the 
start to be able to be executed from a remote mount, most of the time 
mounted as "read only".

The real reason why I sent this was a plea from a user and customer. 
Please, please, please, do not fall into the trap the LINUX gang has 
fallen into. Applications are becoming increasingly interdependent, and 
most of the time are mandating a write back to the directory the 
application is installed in. Installing a single application is usually 
an exercise in frustration, having to load many additional packages, 
different versions of the same software, all in different locations, etc 
...; it's just a mess.

Designing for working in a served, "read only" mount, could help push 
the adoption of things such as grid computing, application streaming, 
and mobility in general.

The possibility of developing "utility" servers, and having the software 
and data be mounted to it, makes the environment much easier to 
administer. It takes the thin concept, one level up, from the client to 
the server.

This is near and dear to my heart, as I live and die in the distributed 
space. Having consistency in the client and server environment is 
critical in a very large enterprise. Use of new technologies such as 
Kerberos and NFSv4 allow large companies to save significant resources, 
both in hardware and software.

Looking at a lot of the developer mailing lists, I see that this basic 
premise is being lost. More and more developers are just adopting what 
the LINUX guys are doing, which is the Microsoft model of just have all 
the resources local. This is a subtle change from running in the served 
environment. If we don't start to recognize that this is not necessarily 
the best place to go, it might become very difficult to change in the 
future.

Thank you for listening,

Gary A. Ross
NetOps Architecture and Infrastructure
Ford Motor Company
email: gross at ford.com



John Rice wrote:
> Joel, memory is certainly one limiting factor, but CPU is often the 
> more important constraint on a SunRay. With a hundred users on a box 
> if specifc apps start eating CPU, it doesn't take long to grind the 
> box into the ground. Browser loading pages with poorly written 
> javascript, java applet that's misbehaving, looping flash animation 
> ... are just some of the things that can cause this to happen [check 
> out bugzilla and look for memory issues to see how many are related to 
> poorly designed pages].
>
> The browser would appear to be the biggest hog on the system with 
> regard to memory consumption. If the user has 20-30 tabs open with 
> plenty of graphics on them, you can see heap usage for the browser 
> going over 100 Meg without any problem. Ideas have been knocked around 
> to make the browser more efficient, from having it not store images in 
> memory for hidden tabs, to improving how it allocates pixmaps on the 
> xserver and/or having direct support in xorg for compressed pixmaps, 
> but no one is currently working on implementing any of these ideas.
>
> JR
>
> Joel Buckley wrote:
>
>>>> Eric Boutilier wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Ok, but seriously, why minimize a user desktop?
>>>>
>>>>
>>
>> The limiting factor on SunRay2 deployment is Memory
>> use on per User Desktop. 60 SunRay User Desktops
>> managed on a single SunRay Server appears to be typical...
>>
>> The top memory consumption programs are:
>>
>> - Xorg
>> - Mozilla
>> - Firefox
>> - Thunderbird
>> - StarOffice
>> - Gnome-Terminal
>>
>> In the target audience for SunRays, what are the primary
>> applications utilized on SunRays?
>>
>> Any reductions in Memory consumption of the above applications
>> results in a direct ability to scale SunRay User Desktops on a
>> single SunRay Server instance.
>>
>> Joel.
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> desktop-discuss mailing list
>> desktop-discuss at opensolaris.org
>>
>>
>
>
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>
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-- 
Gary A. Ross
NetOps Architecture and Infrastructure
Ford Motor Company
email: gross at ford.com
Phone: (313) 390-4313