[Server-devel] School Server system speed diagnotic

[George Hunt]

Hi all,

In the Philippine deployments, the local decision makers have tried to buy
locally, and the machines use roughly 80 watts, idling, bursting to 120
during startup.

The inadequate power situation causes rolling brown outs and load
shedding.  I've been unable to document the decrease in performance they
might encounter if they shifted their usage to a dual core Atom 30 watt MSI
or a 10 watt fitpc. Selling the idea of deep cycle batteries for school
servers, would be a lot easier if we didn't need so much power drain!

For lack of anything better, I started asking them to time the startup time
until the school server presented a logon prompt.  Yet, I also noticed that
if network interfaces were down, or if there was no wan connectivity, there
would be timeouts which would add noise to such an approach.

As I have understood what I've read, the ejabberd service is currently the
performance bottleneck.  I don't have much familiarity with cpu test
suites.  Does anyone have a suggestion on benchmark programs that would be
useful in predicting actual performance in the schools? If no one has
experience in the area, I can do the googling and reading.  Sometimes it
makes sense to ask first.

Thanks
George
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