Performance testing (pass 1)

[Craig Ringer]

>>2. Is any one at RHL working on desktop performance?
 >
> One thing I hope to do over the next several months is to write
> up a project list for experiments and measurements relating to
> desktop performance and get that up on the Fedora web page.

I, for one, would be interested in seeing something like that. I'm not 
sure how much I could help out, but even if it were just the "boring 
stuff" - testing changes on a bunch of different hardware - I'd be game 
to do what I could. Time permitting, of course - a sysadmin's job is 
never done :-/

>>One of the original sugestions of why to use Linux is that it could buy 
>>you longer life on the old hardware... this does not seem to be the case. 
> 
> I don't think it's ever been a terribly realistic claim for office
> desktop use. It does tend to be true for server applications ...
> a lot of servers can be run on basically nothing for hardware.

Another area where it's remarkably true is moving your existing desktops 
into thin client roles. Sure, you can do it with other OSes as well, but 
it's a lot less fuss to have a simple netbooted OS that only does just 
enough to get an X server going. The alternative is usually a full OS 
just for RDP/ICA or a custom cut-down OS build (at a pretty steep price) 
to do the dedicated thin client job.

> It also can be true for "Kiosk" type applications... some of the
> alternative desktops (Xfce, say) can be quite light.

Hooray :-)
I'm using XFCE4 in production (and have been for some time - sure, it 
was pre-release, but it was more stable than half the other stuff out 
there and fit our needs perfectly), and can't be positive enough about 
it, especially for uses like thin clients and "low functionality" desktops.

> But if you
> need to run OpenOffice, then the savings there are probably
> irrelevant.

You'd be surprised, at least in the case of thin clients. The GUI of 
something like GNOME or KDE has a much bigger performance impact on a 
thin client than an app like OpenOffice, at least in my experience. I 
initially tried out GNOME for our terminals, but found the performance 
hit to be quite significant - especially login time.

Of course, for simple thin clients there are other issues with GNOME and 
KEE - central configuration and management, ability to handle the "user 
== drooling moron" case without breaking, etc.

Craig Ringer