[X2go-Dev] Status load balancing in X2go, and alternatives

[John A. Sullivan III]

On Wed, 2011-09-14 at 09:43 +0200, Paul van der Vlis wrote:
> Op 13-09-11 12:44, Mike Gabriel schreef:
> > Hi again,
> > 
> > On Di 13 Sep 2011 11:19:38 CEST Paul van der Vlis wrote:
> > 
> >> What is the status of load balancing in X2go?
> >>
> >> Is it eventually an idea to use an load balancing system what is more
> >> generic? Someone experience with X2go?
> > 
> > X2go has load balancing included in x2goclient code. On possible
> > mechanism for load balancing is using LDAP. We currently do not offer
> > LDAP bootstrap utilities any more, though. And it is not documented in
> > the Wiki either. A real deficit that you digged out.
> 
> Do you think the older LDAP bootstrap utilities will still work?
> 
> > Tools for X2go http broker based load balancing are currently under
> > development, but not yet released for the public. This is all x2goclient
> > based, currently.
> 
> What do you mean with "http broker based"?  (I really don't understand
> what you mean)  Who is working on it?  Is it in git?
> 
> What do you know about bigger excisting installations? Are there
> installations with load balancing, eventually with an older version of X2go?
> 
> With regards,
> Paul.
> 
> 
We are building that scale of environment.  For better or worse, we have
been so overrun with consulting work that we are way behind where we
hoped to be in our X2Go build but we have taken a different approach.

We integrated X2Go and Linux-VServer.  Each user has a dedicated system
(great for things like non-repudiation) but the extra resource
requirements are minimal.  We then moved the x2gocleansession
processing to the VServer host so there is only one daemon running every
five seconds instead of hundreds.

We also adapted the database to use schemas - one per user, and triggers
for coordinating individual user changes with the master database used
by x2gocleansession and other reporting utilities we created.  Thus, we
have a single database for all those potentially hundreds of X2Go
servers.

Finally, we adapted the x2go printing so that we could use a single CUPS
server for all X2Go users and not have hundreds of instances of CUPS
running.

So far it has scaled very nicely but I am way behind in seeing how we
would make the same changes to 3.99 - John