[Testing] First real-life "Chat on school server" performance test results

[Joseph A. Feinstein]

Last Friday we conducted the first real-life "Chat on school server" 
tests at 1cc. We had 62 laptops connected to (and registered with) a 
school server. Every laptop was running the Chat activity. I gave 20 
laptops to 20 people at 1cc and asked them to start chatting with 
each other. They did. Some even started sending drawings to each 
other (I haven't planned this load, though). We had this going for ~ 
15 minutes.

The results are:

1. After several minutes some of the laptops experienced noticeable 
delays while doing chatting. I personally observed (and that was 
confirmed by other people) that when I typed something into the 
Chat's window, the typed text hasn't appeared in the Chat's window 
for quite a while. I even started getting thoughts that I had a 
malfunctioning keyboard in my machine, but this wasn't the case. See #8806.

2. Moving a couple of laptops ~ 60 feet from the school server (to 
the finance office near the OLPC's entrance) caused these two laptops 
to stop chatting even while they were still connected to the school 
server. Moving them back closer to the school server restored 
chatting. See #8823.

3. Two of the laptops stopped collaborating completely, while being 
located close enough to the school server and still connected to it. 
After the Chat activity was restarted in each of the machines, one of 
the Chats was in the "My Neighborhood" state, another - in the 
"Private" state, both laptops were connected to the school server, 
but none restored collaboration with other "chatting" laptops. See #8808.

4. Also, the "Can't close double clicked activities" effect was 
discovered in several laptops (see #8807). This was observed in some 
previous builds, then disappeared, and now appeared back in 767.

Joe