From: support@qdeck.com (Technical Support)
Subject: Re: DESQview/X on a PC?
Organization: Quarterdeck Office Systems, Santa Monica CA
Lines: 61

In article <1qtk84$rn5@picasso.cssc-syd.tansu.com.au> gpatapis@boyd.tansu.com.au writes:
>In article 14595639@wl.aecl.ca, harrisp@wl.aecl.ca () writes:
>>I use DESQview/X and I think it is great. Where it really shines (IMHO) is
>>to let unix users log into a pc and run dos and windows applications with
>>the display going to their screens.
>>You'll need to get:
>>DESQview/X v 1.1
>>DESQview/X v 1.1                           $275 suggested retail
>>DESQview/X to Other X Systems v 1.1        $200 suggested retail
>>
>>You also must be running a supported network (FTP softwares PCTCP,
>>Novell Lan workplace for dos, Sun Microsystems PC-NFS, Beame and WHiteside,
>>Wollongong pathway TCPIp or HP Microsoft Lan Manager)
>>
>>if you don't have any of this network stuff, Quarterdeck will give you a
>>copy of Novell TCPIP transprot for dos with the Network manager.
>>
>>You can get more info by sending email to (appropriately) info@qdeck.com.

Actually, info@qdeck.com is our customer service department. If you have
technical questions, you can write to support@qdeck.com.

>>In my opinion, if you want to have other people logging in and running
>>applications at your pc, you'll want to have a 486 33 with 16 Megs of RAM.
>>Also, the Xwindows software in DESQviewX really seems to like an ET 4000
>>(TSENG Labs chipset) based graphics card. Personally, I found that things
>>ran better with a SCSI drive in the pc than with ESDI drives, but that is
>>my experience only
>
>What sort of traffic is generated with the X-calls?  I am curious to find
>out the required bandwidth that a link must have  if one machine running
>DV/X is supporting multiple users (clients) and we require adequate response
>time.  Anyone have any ideas ??  

I expect the limiting factor will be your server machine, not the network
itself. To give you a real-world example, here at Quarterdeck we have
roughly 100 people using DVX to talk to a bunch of unix boxes, novell
file servers, and each other. It's not _too_ much of a load on our
Ethernet (with maybe 4 concentrators, so you have 20-30 people on each
segment). If you had a badly loaded net, or the apps you wanted to run
were very network intensive, you could run into some slowdowns.

But the biggest problem would be the machine itself. Say you have a 486
33 with plenty of ram and a fast hard disk and network card. If you have
10 people running programs off it, you're going to see some slowdowns
because you're now on (effectively) a 3.3 MHz 486. Of course, DVX will
attempt to see if tasks are idle and make sure they give up their time
slice, but if you have 10 working programs running, you'll know it.

Having said that, if you can tweak the programs being run (by adding
in calls to give up time slices when idle and that sort of
thing), you could probably run 15-20 people on a given machine before
you started seeing slowdowns again (this time from network bandwidth).
It all really depends on what the programs are doing (ie. you're going
to see a slowdown from X-bandwidth a lot sooner if your apps are all
doing network things also...)
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