running class sage servers
Jason Grout
document that tells the requirements of a class sage server? (i.e.,
memory, setting bridged networking on, maybe some example
configurations, showing how to use the server_pool option, etc...)?
Ben Woodruff wrote:
>
> I took my class to the computer lab for the last 30 minutes of class
today to try Sage, and apparently we either overloaded the server, or it
was just really slow this morning. Do you know if it is possible to
install the sage notebook on your own server? .... I know that you can
download sage and put it on your own machine together with VMWare. If I
want to have the students use Sage without having to download the
software and deal with a virtual machine, can I install on our server at
BYU-I a way for the students to login and run Sage?
Reply from Jason:
Yesterday there was an article that referenced Sage on slashdot.
William estimates that there were about 250 new accounts yesterday. We
may be seeing the slowdown still from that.
The vmware machine that you download is (almost) exactly the same thing
that is running sagenb.org. Every version of Sage that you download has
a sage server in it.
Just start Sage (by typing in "sage" at the login prompt) and type:
notebook?
and you'll see a bunch of options. For you, you'll probably want
something like:
notebook(accounts=True, address="some address or IP address that you
will access the server with")
I think there may be one other thing you need to do. In VMWare, you
need to set up the networking to be "bridged" networking, so that people
outside of your computer can access the vmware virtual computer.
You can even run it from your office computer, if there is any way to
access your office computer from the lab computers. How many students
do you have logging in simultaneously? You need to have enough memory
to support lots of sage processes running at the same time. If I recall
correctly, I think the vmware computer will need to have about 55M of
memory for each sage process (i.e., each running worksheet), so if you
have 35 students, that's 35*55=1925M just for the worksheets, so with
the operating system and notebook process, probably 2.2G of memory would
be sufficient. And that's just for the VMWare virtual server. You
still need memory for the host computer's operating system. I think I
figured once that if I wanted to set up my own server to serve about
30-35 simultaneous students, it would take a computer with about 3Gig of
memory. I would allocate about 2.5G towards the VMWare virtual computer.
Also, you could probably have directed some students to demo.sagenb.org
and demo2.sagenb.org. William set those up so there would be a server
or two without the heavy load of sagenb.org. They each have 8Gig of
memory and 2 processors allocated to them. I'm not sure how much
sagenb.org has allocated to it. I think it has 2 processors allocated
to it, though. My guess is that demo.sagenb.org and/or demo2.sagenb.org
could have been sufficient for you. If you have any questions about
whether you can use something like demo.sagenb.org, etc., just email the
support list or William directly.
All of the sagenb.org, demo.sagenb.org, etc., run on a 24 processor,
128GB of ram box.
By the way, one of the biggest goals of William's current rewrite of the
notebook is to make it scale much, much better.
Jason
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Jason Grout