Openfire Network Usage Excessive?

Hi Openfire community!

As our company has grown larger, we have been experiencing some major networking issues especially with our inter-office VPN connections.

To get a better picture of what was all going on, I installed Paessler and used the packet sniffing sensor.What I found was that Openfire was intermitently, and sometimes constantly, sending and receiving fairly large amounts of data from every single IM client that is connected to the Openfire server. Within a five minute interval, each IM client sends between 4-9mb of data to the Openfire server. During the same five minute interval, our Openfire server is pushing 4-9mb of data to the IM client. With 185 users, the numbers do add up.

Now in all actuality, this might be perfectly normal and business usual for Openfire. The thing is I don’t know. If this IS normal for Openfire, what is it doing that this amount of data is exchanged? Group chats, regular chat sessions, resyncing conversations, resyncing avatars?

Thank you in advance for any insight or input into this issue. Even if this turns out to be a non-issue, I’ll atleast know that my network ist he bottleneck and not Openfire behaving improperly.

I’ve attached some pictures from our packet sniffer to illustrate Openfire connections and the amount of data being exchanged. Keep in mind that we do have 185 users so that list just a small chunk of the connections seen.

Hello,

Avatars would be my first suspicion. You’ll want to put your chat client into debug, so it dumps out the XML payloads and see what’s causing the chatter. For example, connect a pidgin client and load up the XML Debug Console.

daryl

1 Like

Hi Daryl,

Thanks for the suggestion. I’ll give it a try.

Any other tips or insight would be greatly appreciated.

users wouldn’t happen to be macs using ichat would they?

Nope, all PC’s here.