what is the limit on number of concurrent Xvnc servers?

[Mike Miller]

On Tue, 15 Apr 2003, Jeff Boerio wrote:

> What will your users be doing?

Lots of different things.  Probably running KDE or Gnome, doing SAS
analyses, probably not a lot of graphics.  I wouldn't expect everyone to
be on at the same time, so they should be swapped out much of the time (I
assume that's how Xvnc works).


> From my experience, you'll run into hardware limitations before you'll
> run out of available ports on the machine.

My eight users seem to be doing fine on 640 MB, so I'm thinking that with
8192 MB, I can support more than 100 Xvnc users.


> We have 2gb and 4gb machines available, but with heavy interactive usage
> (and with large applications), it makes little sense to allow more than
> 10 people to concurrently have active VNC sessions.

It may make more sense to stop them, but how do you stop them?  Maybe I
don't understand what you mean by 'active'.  It seems to me that if the
Xvnc processes are running, I don't have a way to stop users from making
those processes active and using memory.  If, on the other hand, by
'active' you just mean that the Xvnc process is running, I guess there
might be a way to stop people.  Still, I'd rather let them go at it and
see what happens.


> If you're expecting users to be able to use graphics-intensive or
> CPU-intensive applications, web browsers, etc, then you'll not want to
> use this approach.  If everyone's running nothing but xterms all day
> long, maybe you can do it.

It isn't clear to me what they might do.  I don't expect much graphics and
probably no web browsers.  Mostly xterms, plus overhead from KDE or Gnome.

I'm getting the impression that maybe 99 is my real limit on Xvnc servers
running concurrently.  And that was my original question.  Is 99 the
limit?

Thanks, Jeff for responding to my question.  I really appreciate your
thoughts!

Mike