Publish/Subscriber scalability constraints

I am sorry that this question is a bit vague, but…

Theoretically, can an OpenFire server support tens of thousands of subscribers subscribed to hundreds of publishers?

This thread:

http://mail.jabber.org/pipermail/standards/2006-February/010028.html.

from 2006 mentions some architectural issues that might keep an XMPP server from scaling multi user chat and Publisher-Subscriber messages. From the discussion it appears that this constraint would prevent a scenario like the one I describe above.

thanks for any addtional info you can provide.

Do you mean subscribed to hundreds of nodes? I think the answer to your question will be very dependent on many things, several that I know can easily affect performance/scalability are:

  1. Message rate.
  2. Do the subscriptions have options? Any type of filtering on the message content will obviously have an impact on scalability.
  3. Are the nodes persistent? This would require extra work for the service, which again will affect scalability.

Then there are of course factors like the expected hardware. I don’t know if OpenFire will support it or not if all these (and I am sure other) factors are kept at their simplest settings, but I think you will have to be more specific in your requirements to even speculate.

Yes, subscribed to those 100 nodes.

Does that limitation caused by the publish/subscriber architecture still exist?

for the sake of arugment, what if:

Message Rate = 20 per second

No filtering

the nodes do not need to be persistant

I am aware of a bandwidth calculator for XMPP. Which helps calculate some of this but i am having trouble figuring out if this architectural feature might actually be the constraint in this situation instead of bandwidth.

thanks for your help.