Mailing List Archive

Safe Value for Number of Children and Max Consoles per Child
Howdy All,

I'm using conserver to connect to consoles on our Annex Terminal Servers, well
I'm having a bit of math problem.

We have 13 terminal servers with 64 ports each, that's 832 ports conserver's
got to cover.

I notice that be default conserver builds itself to allow 32 child processes
watching 8 consoles each.

Well that don't add up.

Anybody else out there got experience using conserver on large installations?
How far can you safely crank up NUM_CHILDREN and MX_CONSOLES?
Do I need to start thinking about load sharing across two console server
hosts? (note most of our 832 ports are unused, but I still need to cover all
of them)

Thanks,
Scott Matott sXe
--
Scott Matott sXe
Systems Administration
The Hull Group
311 S. Wacker Drive Suite 1400
Chicago, Il 60606
Phone: 312-697-2717
Re: Safe Value for Number of Children and Max Consoles per Child [ In reply to ]
Well, with 7.0.0 I changed the default number of consoles per process
to 16...the old value of 8 is pretty small for most systems today
(they're fast, large number of file descriptors per process, etc).

I've worked with a site that was using values of 16/96...their biggest
issue was the memory requirements of having close to 96 conserver
processes on the host. Aside from the lack of encryption on network
traffic, this is my second biggest complaint about the software: bad
memory management. I won't go into all the details, but each process
keeps a full copy of all data.

So, going with those values will definately work (assuming you have
enough VM). I'd expect that values of 32/64 would work as well.

32 (consoles)
* 3 (console,logfile,user)
+ 8 (stdin,stdout,stderr,other?)
===
104 file descriptors per process.

That's not too bad (boy, I hope I got that formula right - it's
close). By going with 32 per process you'll reduce your overall VM
usage as well.

Bottom line: 16 per process is a safe bet...I'd be willing to bet 32
per process is ok as well. The process limit shouldn't matter except
for VM usage.

Bryan

On Fri, Feb 23, 2001 at 10:12:20AM -0600, scott.matott@htc.com wrote:
>
> Howdy All,
>
> I'm using conserver to connect to consoles on our Annex Terminal Servers, well
> I'm having a bit of math problem.
>
> We have 13 terminal servers with 64 ports each, that's 832 ports conserver's
> got to cover.
>
> I notice that be default conserver builds itself to allow 32 child processes
> watching 8 consoles each.
>
> Well that don't add up.
>
> Anybody else out there got experience using conserver on large installations?
> How far can you safely crank up NUM_CHILDREN and MX_CONSOLES?
> Do I need to start thinking about load sharing across two console server
> hosts? (note most of our 832 ports are unused, but I still need to cover all
> of them)
>
> Thanks,
> Scott Matott sXe
> --
> Scott Matott sXe
> Systems Administration
> The Hull Group
> 311 S. Wacker Drive Suite 1400
> Chicago, Il 60606
> Phone: 312-697-2717
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> users mailing list
> users@conserver.com
> https://www.conserver.com/mailman/listinfo/users