ClearCube R1200 User Manual download pdf (Page 14)

Principled Technologies, Inc.: ClearCube PC Blade vs. thin client

performance in typical office application scenarios

Test methodology

We evaluated the performance of each of the application scenarios (see “Application scenarios”) both by hand

and with automated test scripts, which we developed with IBM’s Visual Test 6.5. Appendix B details the steps we

followed when we hand-timed the scenarios. In this paper, we concentrate our discussions on the results of the

automated scripts, because those results are generally more repeatable than hand timings.

We created a test network for each of the three client types: ClearCube Model R1200 PC Blades, Sun Ray 2 thin

clients, and Wyse Winterm 5150SE thin clients. Each test network included a file server, five client systems, and,

for the Sun Ray 2 thin clients, the special Sun server they require. We used a pair of identical file servers to allow

us to have two networks under test at a time. Appendix A provides detailed configuration information on all of the

different systems we used in our test. We used a 100-Mbps network infrastructure whenever possible, because

that infrastructure is common in enterprises today.

For the Sun Ray 2 thin client test network, we set up user accounts and Windows Terminal Server on the file

server. For the Wyse Winterm 5150SE thin client test network, we set up the file server so it would have accounts

for all five Wyse Winterm 5150SE thin clients and run the Citrix Access Essentials software they required to be

able to execute the office applications in our test scripts. In all of these test networks, we assigned each system a

static IP address, with one exception: the Sun Fire V240 server automatically assigned IP addresses to the Sun

Ray 2 thin clients. The ClearCube Model R1200 PC Blade test network required no special setup.

We installed the Microsoft Office 2003 and Adobe Acrobat 7.0 Standard applications so that they would be

available to all the clients. The test scripts run tasks in these applications. Because the thin clients do not have

disks, all their applications and data files reside on the file server. We installed the applications locally on each

ClearCube Model R1200 PC Blade, but to make the performance comparison as fair as possible, we stored the

data files on the server except in one case in which storing a file locally made more sense in the usage model.

We ran four test scripts on each test network with five client configurations:

• 1 client running the script

• 2 clients simultaneously running the script

• 3 clients simultaneously running the script

• 4 clients simultaneously running the script

• 5 clients simultaneously running the script

This approach allowed us to gauge the response-time effects on end users of adding clients to each test network.

For each test script on each test network, we first performed the following script setup steps:

• reboot (in the appropriate order; more on that in the discussions below) the systems in the test network

• create a desktop shortcut for the test script

• create a desktop shortcut for the setup script that prepares the data files for testing

• create a desktop shortcut for the script that cleans up data files between runs of the script

• run the setup script

After we finished this setup process for each script, we ran that script on that network five times in each of the

above five client configurations. If any test or script failed, we discarded that test’s results and ran the test again.

We rebooted the test network systems between each run of each test script.

We refer in this paper only to the median results of each set of five runs on each test network configuration. The

scripts produce times (in milliseconds), with lower times to complete a given function indicating better

performance. We round those times to tenths of seconds in this report.

In the following sections we discuss how to set up each test network and how to execute the tests on that

network.

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