Multiple viewers of same server

[Edward Avis]

>(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)

To me (and I know little about VNC) this seems a bit strange, after all, I 
don't see how you could need a megabyte of memory for each viewer.

Perhaps someone out there could tell us whether the Unix / X version is 
less memory-hungry?

If so, you could run xvncviewer viewing the teacher's machine, connect it 
to the X vncserver, and get the pupils' vncviewers to connect to the X 
vncserver.  Hopefully this should put less of a load on the teacher's 
Windows box, and if the X version is more frugal with memory, you'd get 
improved performance.  Of course, it would be slower than a simple 
one-to-one connection, but that's to be expected.

It should be easy to set up a Linux box (perhaps a temporary version, 
running off the DOS partition using UMSDOS) and get it to automatically 
multiplex the connections.  Even if you can't do that, you could still use 
Valery Tulkinov's Cygwin32 port of Xvnc, and my Cygwin32 port of 
xvncviewer, to use a Windows 95 / 98 / NT box to do the job, though it 
would be slower and a bit more hassle.

Of course, the best solution is for somebody to write a special VNC 
multiplexer - or perhaps you could simply feed exactly the same WinVNC 
output to ten different sockets, and it might work?

--
Ed Avis