[OOD-users] evaluating ood and noVNC

[John-Paul Robinson]

Hi Alan,

I'm glad to hear that performance experience at OSU has been positive 
for noVNC and Matlab.   This suggests it's a local issue we can resolve.

We are running our current beta ood on a login node for our slurm 
cluster.  The node running ood is centos7.3 (cluster wide choice 
currently).   It has 24 cores and 256G ram.  No real user load other 
than beta ood.  Our compute nodes have turbovnc-2.2-20180927.x86_64 and 
python-websockify-0.6.0-2.el7.noarch installed and are similarly 
provisioned with RAM/cores/os.


Our notes for the install are here, in case you'd find it helpful:

https://gitlab.rc.uab.edu/jpr/ohpc_vagrant/issues/9

Let me know if there any potential tuning/debug items to look at.  I 
realize there are many layers here so any obvious performance things to 
check first would help.

Thanks

John-Paul

HPC Architect
Research Computing
UAB IT

P.S. Resent to list since I meant for it to go there.


On 11/4/18 7:51 AM, Chalker, Alan wrote:
> John-Paul:
>
> Thanks for reaching out. We'd be curious to hear more technical 
> details about the environment you are seeing this in. We regularly run 
> MATLAB and terminal instances inside the noVNC sessions and don't have 
> any of these situations. The only time I recall seeing something like 
> this was during stress testing via trying to ls a directory with tens 
> of thousands of files in it, which caused a memory leak in Firefox. I 
> don't believe we were able to replicate it on Chrome or Safari.
>
>
> ---------------------------
> Alan Chalker, Ph.D.
> alanc at osc.edu
> 614-247-8672
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: OOD-users <ood-users-bounces at lists.osc.edu> On Behalf Of 
> John-Paul Robinson via OOD-users
> Sent: Friday, November 2, 2018 4:59 PM
> To: ood-users at lists.osc.edu
> Subject: [OOD-users] evaluating ood and noVNC
>
> Hi Folks,
>
> We've been evaluating ood and now have a beta instance deployed on our 
> cluster.    Over all, the application works great.  It is exactly what 
> we want to see as a modernization of the  HPC user experience.
>
> Our tests with noVNC are seeing a lot of promise but we've noticed 
> some rendering/responsiveness issues with this interface.  In 
> particular, sometimes we see a lack of updates to text typed in a 
> terminal on the VNC desktop and no updates visible until we click on a 
> desktop outside the terminal.  We are also seeing issues with Matlab 
> rendering updates (matlab has been problematic in the past even with 
> traditional vnc clients, so i'm just putting this one out there).  It 
> seems to me that the problems are due to a refresh-rate/detection 
> issue between the X server and the VNC server agent.  If I connect 
> with a traditional VNC client to the hpc desktop, I see the same 
> update issues as i'm seeing on the noVNC client side.  We are testing 
> with xfce.
>
> Thanks for all the work on this great product,
>
> John-Paul
> _______________________________________________
> OOD-users mailing list
> OOD-users at lists.osc.edu
> https://lists.osu.edu/mailman/listinfo/ood-users