Multiple viewers of same server

[Robert S. Huss]

Hello,

I've just recently found VNC, and I'm looking at ways we could use it in
our computer classroom.  We have 26 student machines and an instructor's
station in the room. The instructor's station is projected for all to see.
We have used McAfee's Remote Desktop to allow the instructor to show what
is on a particular student's machine, but have not had any way for more
than one student to view the instructor's station.  

With VNC this is possible, but the instructor's station quickly gets bogged
down if too many people view it. (With just three viewers, WinVNC was using
almost 10 MB of RAM, with 10 viewers, the machine was swapping memory,
running out of virtual memory, and generally crawling)  Is anyone using VNC
in this manner?  Would adding some memory to the machine make it feasible
for 26 machines to view one, where the one might be running some pretty
serious program as well?  

The other possibility is to make a viewing tree, with the instructor's
station being viewed by 2 or 3 machines, which are each then viewed by 2 or
3 machines, etc.  The problem with this is that the people further down in
the tree get a nested sort of view, and are dependant on the people before
them to not move the view around to a bad place.

Is there any interest or possibility in having a 3rd program associated
with VNC for just taking a signal from one machine and handing it off to
another?  So rather than having a viewer and a server on the student
machines, we could have a viewer and a "passer" so the student at each
machine would see just what was coming from the instructor's station, but
the instructor's station wouldn't have to talk to each machine?

Thanks,
Bob Huss

Robert S. Huss, Ph.D.           Department of Chemical Engineering
Project Director                University of Massachusetts
Decision Making by Design       Amherst MA 01003
Curriculum Project              Phone: (413) 545-2819
rhuss "at" ecs.umass.edu             Fax: (413) 545-1647