I have a server that is running remote out of the office… (2M/512k DSL) The latency is pretty good, and if i am downloading files etc, I get a good steady stream at ~65kb/s… I am wondering how many users (all of the users will be on during normal business hours 9-5) I can put on before I will start to notice “issues” ( I can only think of a delay of responses/receipt of messages ) from lack of bandwith maybe from too many queries at once etc…
Has anyone had such experience with a similar setup… I am not looking to put 1,000 users on there, but it may at certain times get as high as 250 users… I know all that is happening is just small XML requests, but I am thinking that a lot of anything can start to add up.
The machine is a AMD64 with 2GB DDR running Gentoo (Stage1 if it matters)… It is on a line doing nothing else but serving this purpose (MySQL will be running for user storage as well). So I think the line will be the limitation before the server , or I hope anyway…
I guess even maybe a heads up as to what I might see as problems from too many users, would be good so down the road I am not tracking “fake” problems caused by cluttered traffic, and not potentially what I may first thing as a client issue etc.
It should not even be 250 people continuously talking, as it will be inter-office, but occassionally I think we will make use of the conference feature, and may have 20-25 people in there at once.
As you said the consumed bandwidth is really related to the XML traffic being generated by clients or server. For normal usage (i.e. occasional chat, occasional file transfer)I would say that you are fine. If I’‘m not wrong when I run some stress tests with 150 concurrent users the consumed bandwidth was 5 Megs (including outgoing and incoming traffic). During those tests the 150 users were chatting all the time sending messages every 5 milliseconds. Since I don’'t expect your 250 users to be able to send messages every 5 milliseconds I would say that you are good with your network setup.
to get an idea of the traffic you produce you could enable the audit log (http://server:9090/audit-policy.jsp) and set the maximum file size to 1 MB. Even 1000 concurrent uses do not chat every minute, a lot of them are connected and idle. And also during a conference with 21 users only one talks to 20 users, so depending on the amount of text one says you will send 10-100 kB (uncompressed), so it may take 2 seconds for everybody to get the content. But as you may want to use encryption and compression (about 10x) no one should see a delay.
if you mean the audit packets: select everything you can select, presence and iq messages are also exchanged during normal operation and you may want to track also this traffic.
The logs are not compressed, so you may want to gzip them to get an idea about the transfered traffic.