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Date:      Thu, 17 Jul 2008 13:49:28 +0200
From:      "Jonas Lund" <whizzter@gmail.com>
To:        developer@grinz.com
Cc:        freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: recommendations for multi-user X11
Message-ID:  <436c7eda0807170449n15ebb789t841ec0757973ab89@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <487E602D.50504@grinz.com>
References:  <487D07AC.4030205@grinz.com> <436c7eda0807160448g477cbbd8i26423e70a9294f19@mail.gmail.com> <487E602D.50504@grinz.com>

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> The only applications required on the client end - ssh and vnc - are
> available (often freely) for every major PC and smartphone OS.

I'd take a peek at tightvnc or ultravnc. I know that atleast tightvnc
supports more and newer encoding methods that could bring down the
bandwidth requirement. (And if you indtend it to be run in strange
places, bandwidth will be very important as slow links makes vnc
unbearable)

> There is only one user right now -- me. 10 is an arbitrary benchmark: how
> much hardware would 10 users require?

I doubt you'll get an good answer without actually running this. I
definetly support the notion of going for a cheap computer... as long
as it has plenty of ram!

> Playing media is the lowest priority of the system. The point was simply
> that embedded media encountered during the normal course of browsing COULD
> be played.
> One advantage of surfing from a remote computer is that your actual location
> and network are not exposed. One might find a few videos one would prefer to
> watch poorly yet anonymously.
>
> I can think of some places around the world where a "normal PC" probably
> can't play videos.
> The goal is a service that can be accessed as easily from an ancient PC as a
> new one.
>
> A ha! Hard numbers. Thank you. I was planning on 500MB RAM per user. Can we
> do the same thing with processor MHz? I was thinking 200MHz per user.

If you open a few tabs with swedens biggest online newspaper you're
gonna make firefox unresponsive regardless of your cpu. My entire old
singlecore 1ghz laptop became unresponsive by doing this prior to me
installing noscript(This is on windows tho).

Videos or flash animations are going to create alot of "uncompressed"
data sent over the wire using vnc. I don't have hard and exact numbers
here but from experience i'd say that looking at the same video over
vnc/ssh would require about as much cpu as watching the video directly
but with greater bandwidth requirement. This is because the big amount
of data that is going to need much cputime for decryption

> Typical usage scenario:
> Get to the office. Turn on your computer. Launch PuTTY (log in). Launch
> VNCViewer.

If you're gonna do this for nontechnical people you should look at
making an integrated vnc viewer with ssh built in. (Or finding one..
check tightvnc and ultravnc)

> Your desktop is as you left it - an email is half-written in Thunderbird;
> Firefox has 5 tabs open with half-finished research on php-gtk.
> During the day you will use Open Office to draft a sales letter or a
> spreadsheet; Pidgin to chat with colleagues and friends; an address book and
> calendar. Anything you need to print is printed to PDF, downloaded with
> PSFTP and printed out locally.

Doing all this wouldn't require much more than "peak" cpu tops. So you
could prolly get away with a fairly cheap cpu. If you allow flash and
other media stuff in firefox f.ex. i have no idea what will happen.

> Upload your entire music collection. Manage your playlists on - and stream
> them from - the server.

Umm,.. does vnc even support sound?


What you really need is testing. I'd say get some el-cheapo thingy and
add lots of ram (I will stand by that, you don't notice ram until you
run out of it :) and force some friends or something to stress it.

/ Jonas



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