Re: TFTP Booting & Bandwidth

On Wed, 2005-05-18 at 09:32 -0400, [email protected] wrote:
> Just a quick one this, 
> 
> How much bandwidth does a client use in booting pxes from a tftp server?
> I'm looking at 40 clients, all booted around the same time (i.e. 9am), over
> a 100Mb link and possibly (for some sites) over a 10Mb link. How viable is
> this?

Very.

The bandwidth usage is actually pretty easy to calculate.  Take the size
of your image, plus the size of your kernel and multiply it times the
number of simultaneous clients.

So let's just assume all 40 are in the same location.  I'm also going to
just guess at 20MB for the size of the image, just to make life easier
on us.

This would be the equivalent of 800MB to be downloaded.  Now, at
100Mbit/s, or 12.5MB/s, it would take 64 seconds for every machine to
download the entire image, if they all started at the same time (and you
didn't have any other overhead on your network).

These are all calculated using the ideal throughput of a 100Mbit link,
but you get the idea.

-- 
Chris Gianelloni
Release Engineering - Strategic Lead/QA Manager
Games - Developer
Gentoo Linux

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