>From: "Ka Kit Lai" <address@hidden> >Organization: CCNY >Keywords: 200003221803.LAA13132 McIDAS-X memory multiple users server LDM >decode Ka, > This is Ka Kit from CCNY weather station. I have a question regarding >"halo" performance. Prof. Hindman ran a class yesterday and try to run >Mcidas on 8 PC mount to halo. Given the computing power of your machine (halo), this is inadvisable. >But he can only be able to run 5 PC with the >Mcidas running sluggishly, another additional PC had slow down the halo >dramatically, almost impossible to run mcidas. I am assuming that you are running McIDAS on halo itself. This means that you will be asking the machine to support 8 concurrent Xwindow sessions and all of the McIDAS processing that is requested by each user. It would take a machine with a lot of processing power to keep up with this. >Halo currently has 128 MB >memory and we plan to upgrade it to 256 MB. Do you have any sugggestion of >how much memory we need in order to run Mcidas (or gempak) on 11-15(max) PC? I would say that the amount of memory needed would be far in excess of 256 MB; perhaps it would be greater than 1 GB. The real thing to worry about is the CPU speed. > Also, Halo is running on a Sparc 20, do you think that would be the >cause of the problem? Yes, it is definitely not a fast machine. >Should we buy another faster machine to replace this >one, A SPARC 20 is now a pretty old, slow machine especially if one is trying to support a number of users concurrently. >any suggestion to what machine we should replace? I would say that the model of running the desired program (e.g., McIDAS-X or GEMPAK) from a single machine is automatically doomed to failure. Can the PCs you are using be upgraded to run Solaris x86 or Linux so that McIDAS-X/GEMPAK could run directly on them. This way, the SPARC 20 would be used as a data server. >Sometimes Halo is >running sluggishly even for the console(like when I login to halo locally), Right. It is doing all of the data ingestion and decoding. Again, it is a pretty slow machine. >should we avoid running the mcidas/gempak on the halo locally? If this is possible, then the answer is yes. >I need to >occassionally reboot the machine in order to improve this problem, what will >be the problem? I think that if you ran 'top' while trying to support all of those users, you would find that the system is totally maxed out. Adding more memory will help a little, but this is not the ultimate solution. > Thank you very much and I look forward to your reply. You are welcome. Tom Yoksas
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