[wpkg-users] creative ideas to spread out the running of wpkg installs?

[Urs Rau]

Friends,

Wpkg is a great product, but it doesn't come without it's own dangers
and traps.

One of the traps is that in order to make sure the wpkg installs get
pushed out inside a reasonable timeframe, I opted to setup a scheduled
task that restarts the wpkg service every two hours. Turns out that can
be more problematic than I was expecting.

The other day I was adding "adobe reader 8.1" to our sites main profile.

The result was that ~ 70 PCs were trying to download and install a >=
90MB file from the server. This gave me an average uptime of around 30+
for about 2 hours. Basically the install processes were slowing each
other down so much, that users couldn't work on the PCs. We had to go
running around and start switching about 50 - 70% of the PCs off. For
the remaining started installs to finnish. But this created 2 hours of
chaos and almost unuesable workstations.

The server isn't really underspeced and has not ever shown signs of
slowing down any other time, under normal usage and loads.

Does anybody have any clever or creative ideas on how to avoid this sort
of overload? Maybe having a central file that monitors requests that the
wpkg service want's to launch and a service that monitors sensible loads
 and tells the wpkg service on the workstations to delay until it thinks
the server load allows for more processes?

How have others worked around this?

The thought of installing MS .Net frameworks or MS office pkgs using
wpkg now seems really frightening.

Thanks for any suggestions or poiters.

-- 
Urs Rau						



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