Dear Mihai,
Thanks for your quick reply! It sounds like switching to KDE is likely a good step for saving on resources. As for colour depth, it sounds like it may not have much effect on bandwidth. But how about server CPU usage - is this a demanding part of the server's contribution?
Cheers, Jordan
Jordan Poppenk, Ph.D. Canada Research Chair in Cognitive Neuroimaging Department of Psychology and Centre for Neuroscience Studies Queen's University http://popmem.com 613-533-6009
On 2016-02-09, 7:12 AM, "Mihai Moldovan" <ionic@ionic.de> wrote:
On 09.02.2016 08:41 AM, Jordan Poppenk wrote:
- Does X2Go do its desktop rendering on the server's GPU? That is, in building a server to support X2Go sessions, should I buy a fancy graphics card when trying run many sessions; or alternatively multiple core CPU's? If GPU matters, does it matter whether the card is of the GeForce vs. Quadro variety?
Currently no, not at all.
- Does reducing colour depth have any substantive effect on the CPU/GPU/bandwitdth burden on the server? My users don't really need more than thousands of colours. I know this and JPEG quality can be adjusted client-side, but when I played with these settings, it didn't seem to impact server-side bandwidth (which continued to hover around 1Mbit per client even with just a few colours). Should I be adjusting this in the LXDE startup settings instead?
In theory, yes. A lower color depth normally translates to smaller images in size, but of course the general compression ratio achieved by the algorithm - which is also based on properties of the raw image data - might make this point moot (especially if the image doesn't actually contain a big variety of colors.)
So that question is actually quite difficult to answer definitely, "it depends."
- Is it fair to estimate that I need about 1Gb of RAM per client (just to load the desktop) just to load LXDE as the desktop?
1 GB sounds high for LXDE, but I have never measured this. Maybe others did. Still, the problem here, too, is that the answer is: "it depends." For instance, consider Java-based applications: these use separate VMs for each invokations and do not share any internal state, so the individual footprint is high. Compare that to, for instance, KDE(4), which as far as I know does a decent job of sharing libraries - hence only the first started session will have a huge impact, with subsequent sessions adding less to the global memory footprint (not "nothing", of course, because only libraries are shared, no actual program data.)
Mihai