Graphics programs for ts

[jrubinstein]

Any help would be welcomed. We have two ms terminal servers 2003 and mix of clients, mostly Sunrays but some converted old machines that use MsRdp connections (no Citrix). Up until recently nobody bothered with the high end graphics programs but they are installed on the Ts machines. Now we've got a (rightly) keen ICT teacher who has the kids using Macromedia Fireworks and Flash. You will not be astonished to hear that this slows the performance of the Ts machines right down.

Does anyone know of any way to improve the performance, or of a graphics program which will operates within Ts efficiently. From what I can see each use of Fireworks is taking it's own bit of the processor.

Thanks in advance.

Jay

[j17sparky]

Im quite sure you aint going to find any that work well with TS. Maybe if someone has designed one especially and you need to install some sort of client on the TS machine...

TS and multimedia just dont work.

[dhicks]

Does anyone know of any way to improve the performance, or of a graphics program which will operates within Ts efficiently.

Is it worth setting the colour depth to 16-bit instead of 24 or 32-bit? Our NComputing-based system uses 16-bit graphics, and I was worried that it produce a noticeable on-screen difference, but it doesn't actually seem to be a problem. Even Photoshop lists only 16-bit graphics as a minimum requirement, so it might be worth a try.

--
David Hicks

[linescanner]

We have a number of 1000 s of Sun Ray deployed in UK education. Most of the schools use the Macromedia suite of apps. They run fine in the most part, Fireworks needs to be kept an eye on.

We use load balancing to ease some of the isssues. The art is scaling your TS farm to cope.

What is the spec of your TS servers and how many concurrent users do the accept ?

[Ric_]

Fireworks does eat RAM from breakfast and I've never found a way around it on my Citrix farm...

What we tend to do is use The GIMP which doesn't suffer from this problem.

[Butuz]

It's RAM that's the problem, as soon as you run out of RAM and the system starts using the pagefile - performance takes a nosedive.

Really, if you want to run these programs on a terminal server you will just have to reduce the number of thin clients per server and possibly buy another terminal server.

Not ideal!

Butuz

[nut-ed]

Does your Sun and PC thin clients both give the same (poor) performance...?

How does a "modern" PC running RDP compare...?

If one gives better performance than the others maybe your bottleneck is not the server but the thin-client's rendering abilities.....

[Ric_]

If one gives better performance than the others maybe your bottleneck is not the server but the thin-client's rendering abilities.....

It tends not to be a rendering problem with Fireworks... it just eats RAM for fun. A program like AppSense could limit this behaviour but there is cost involved there.

Seriously, GIMP is the way forward... the memory footprint is tiny in comparison.