Linux Terminal Server Essay

[Steve Meyers]

On Fri, 2003-04-04 at 13:21, Mike wrote:
> About how many clients would you estimate per server? What I mean is how
> many terminals could a server fully serve? Also, I was talked to today
> and it seems that running say 50 computers off of a server with a
> gigabit ethernet would still not be that fast, as the processing is done
> on the server (or is it not?) and so you have the cable sending the info
> to the server, the server processing it and then responding...it gets
> sent back through the cable...and so on. 

Here's how LTSP works.  All of the processing takes place on the
server.  That's why you use one beefy server, and lots of lightweight
terminals.  The terminals only run X, and connect to the server.  The
programs run on the server, and the display and keyboard/mouse input are
ferried across your ethernet connection.