I find Jive Messenger a great and easy software for setting up an IM server. And now, I have been given a task to set up the IM server for about 30000 - 40000 of concurrent users.
So may I know what’'s the max number of users Jive can support? How am I going to make sure that the server will be able to handle this number of users? Like setting up a server farm, load balancing or?
Pls do help me in this, as I’'m still kinda new to accommodating to such large number of users.
One instance of messenger can support 7000-8000 concurrent users. Is the 30k to 40k the total number of users or total number of concurrent users?
To make messenger scale futher under one instance, you’'ll need to get a box that can handle more than 8 processors and 64-bit processing. Hopefully you have a budget for this type of hardware.
To add to Noah’‘s post – the best option depending on time frame of deployment (4 months or more) will be will be the new scalability features we’'re working on. That will make it much easier to scale up to this many users. Check out the Pampero forum for more information – http://www.jivesoftware.org/community/forum.jspa?forumID=48
You can split the load across machines, however, the domains are isolated (unless you establish s2s between two servers). Since you mentioned online gaming, you might be able to get away with shards per domain. Ie. shard1.metaGenes.comshard2.metaGenes.com, etc. I’‘m not aware of any game that supports 30-40k users per world/realm/shard, but then I’'m not in the industry.
If fragmenting your domain isn’‘t an option, you’‘re going to have to go the “big iron” route and get an 8way+ processor with as much ram you can afford. You’‘ll also need a backend database that can handle the concurrency. I’‘m not sure how much contention is put on the database, but I think for normal chat it’‘s pretty low. You might be able to get away with a Postgres (I’‘m assuming you’‘re on a small budget…please correct me if I’‘m wrong). I’‘d recommend a sun 8way box, but it’‘ll put you back about 100-150k. Since this box can be a single point of failure, go with sun or ibm and steer clear of intel/amd configuration. I don’'t think that intel/amd is inferior, but when it comes to system maintenance on a live box, the surrounding hardware/engineering plays a hugh factor.
Actually, the scalability is mainly restricted to the program itself right? How many instances can Jive run?
Let’'s say if I use a virtual private server (a physical server divided into multiple virtual servers), and install Jive separately in each virtual server, you think whether it will help to do some load balancing and support large user base?
Btw, the online game I’'m working with has many worlds, and in each world, it is divided into many channels.
The other thing to note is that you cannot move users between instances. Once an account is created, it’'s needs to stay put. s2s would allow world1 to talk to world2, but they need to be addressed specifically.
You may also want to check out ejabberd http://ejabberd.jabber.ru/ . I’'m not so sure about the specs, but it describes itself as: “ejabberd is a Free and Open Source distributed fault-tolerant Jabber/XMPP server”.
servers), and install Jive separately in each virtual
server, you think whether it will help to do some
load balancing and support large user base?
As cliff_dugal noted, you can take a look at ejabberd. It is written in Erlang and that is a programming language that is made to be extremely scalable, clusterable and fault-tolerant. Btw, this evening I have seen a public ejabberd deployment with more than 17,000 concurrent users. Probably that is the public Jabber server with the highest load ever
Btw, the online game I’'m working with has many
worlds, and in each world, it is divided into many
channels.
Something that might interest you: yesterday, there was the Erlang/OTP User Conference 2005. One of the topics was: “A Virtual World Distributed Server developed in Erlang as a Tool for analysing Needs of Massively Multiplayer Online Game Servers.” See http://www.erlang.se/euc/05/ for slides and an overview paper about it.
i really want to thanks everyone for their help. ejabberd seems not bad! will definitely give it a try.
but for the time being, how do i set up a s2s using jive and how do i ensure that accounts created under one domain are universal for the all other domains??
would in principal all be the same user, at least their username and password would remain consistent. Alfred@domain.com wouldn’'t exists (unless you created that domain).
This solution isn’'t perfect because the roster information would not be shared between sub domains and you could contact alfred@sub2.domain.com if alfred is logged into sub1.