Browser on terminal server?

Question

Windows Server

Hello. Please share your experience in creating a terminal server for Internet surfing. There are 1000 employees in the organization, 250 are constantly online on the Internet - judging by the statistics of the proxy server. The idea is to gradually transfer employees to thin clients. from the thin client, the employee will connect to the terminal server - windows server 2019 standart and get access to the Internet there.
I am interested in the following:
1) how many users can be allowed on 1 terminal and with what configuration (virtual machine, how many cores of RAM, etc.)
2) now sites are quite resource-intensive and one user can put the entire server, no matter how powerful it may be - how to limit tabs and resources for the user in this mode?
3) how suitable is such a solution for watching videos in the same YouTube - is it necessary to consider a server with a video card and throw it into a virtual machine, or do current thin clients tolerably digest video traffic via rdp?
4) what current thin clients can fully become an adequate solution? (More inclined to nettops or cheap system units)

Yours faithfully to you and your business!!!

Answer 1

If you do this, install the great suspender plugin or its analogues on chrome.
The bottom line is that it unloads unused tabs from memory.
And many users do not close the tabs at all, and chrome can gobble up sooo much memory.
Ps pay attention, great suspender was recently blocked for cheating, so either you need to take its old version from the git, or take any of its analogues. A lot of them.
For FF too.

Answer 2

Such a decision.
Alternatively, you can try this: create a terminal server - create a user - connect this user to a server - do typical actions that this user will do (open a browser, tabs, other programs) - look at how many resources this user consumes - multiply by the number of such users - count when users gobble up all server resources.

Answer 3

Well, firstly, I would not let users watch YouTube from the terminal - not only is there a double load on the network, it will also interfere with others. You can just start the browser, but Google Chrome at some point lost the ability to configure the memory usage profile through the GPO, and the status of the GPO element "AdditionalLaunchParameters" through which it was possible to set it, is now unknown, what with Firefox - I don’t know at all, I was looking at one time and could not find how to make it not corrode from memory. I assume that your users, on average, will sit in the office and possibly some specialized software (it doesn’t matter which one, browser-based or not). In this case, the correct solution would be to actually put a dozen users on the server and monitor its loading, including swapping.
As for thin clients, I would really like to surf on them, we had nettops 0-10 years old under ubuntu 16.04 with 1-4GB RAM, most had two, xfreerdp acted as an RDP client with a self-written wrapper in Python, which simply asked the user for a password and then launched the client in fullscreen mode, passing the parameters via the command line. In theory, any PC is suitable for working with RDP now, the main thing is that it can display at least 1024x768x24bit and has a 100Mbps network card, and can run an updated browser on itself (i.e. SSE3 in the processor - you need to look further, some browsers collect with a maximum of SSE3, but this may change in the future).

Answer 4

It seems that the option of "letting" users on the terminal for Internet surfing is not the best idea. Since you are moving to thin clients, I suggest you consider the Thinstation option. It can be configured to open xfreerdp in one console and chromium in another (in kiosk mode). You can switch between them. As thin clients, I liked using the Intel NUC. Throw in them 4 gigs of RAM. That should be enough.