I’'m new to all of this and have been reading most of this site today trying to find some answers. Hopefully someone can clue me in…haha.
I have a dedicated server I use for a community site of almost 3000 users. It’'s growing every day. I also host a couple other sites for friends. I am looking for a IM solution for members of my community site. Much like Jabber for LiveJournal.
My questions are:
Do I need a separate server to run Wildfire/Spark or can I run it on the same dedicated server?
If able to run on the same server, would I follow the instructions in the docs the same way for setting it up?
Is it better (resources use, etc) to use MySQL or the embedded database?
What kind of load is put on the server? My server specs are:
Wildfire won’‘t consume much CPU if you, let’'s say, have 5000 connected users and they just chat at a “human rate”. So if that is your case then I would say that you can run Wildfire in the same machine where you are running other servers.
My development machine is Intel Core 2 @ 2.13Ghz with 2GB. I was able to host 30K concurrent users generating traffic at a “human rate”. Wildfire was configured to consume up to 1GB and CPU was never over 50% (as I recall).
The setup process is the same for dedicated or not.
fow Wildfire 2.x I did calculate 1 MB (±512 kb) for every connected user, I assume that the memory usage was improved in 3.2 but as you may want to use gateways or other plugins you should use this value to do your memory calculation. So you’'ll need 128 MB for the JVM itself and 1 MB for every connected (not registerd) user. As you have 2 GB I wonder how much memory is still free.
The database will also use some memory, if you have MySQL experience you should use MySQL.
The SSL handshake and logins with roster queries will take a lot processing time, a running server is cpu friendly.
So if you have there 200 MB free you can start there with 100 exclusive users, this will give you a feeling how Wildfire works and behaves. And if you encounter problems only 100 and not 3000 users have a problem. If the users like this service you have still the option to move it to another server with more memory and more processing power if there’'s the need to do this.