Hi -
I have been reading through the forum and seeing some information about scalability, but only going up as high as 10,000 users in hypothetical situation.
I need to deploy a jabber implementation that will scale to sizes like Skype (i.e. millions of users) with stability. I am wondering if anyone can help lead me in the right direction.
I am also looking for an expert who may consult to my company in setting this up.
Specific questions I have that I would appreciate any feedback on:
1) What is the actual maximum number of registered users, and simultaneous chatters, that anyone knows have been successfully supported in a jabber installation? What was their config (i have seen the ones in the forum that go up to a few thousand users).
2) It seems like the load balancing and clustering that is being deployed here is software based, rather than deploying a hardware load balancer and a dedicated MySQL cluster. Does anyone know if an architecture like this would work for jabber? From what I am reading with the ejabbered version, Erlang seems to be causing problems with small processes running?
What about an architecture where a hardware load balancer is sitting in front of a cluster of ejabbered servers, which can be added to at will - then a cluster of high performance load balanced MySQL servers?
I appreciate any help on this!
Bryan
bryan AT ecentris . com
There's a third question: storage
There's a third question that you will face sometime:
Millions of users will generate not only a lot of CPU consumption, but also a lot of storage consumption. That load may overflow the Mnesia capacity, so you would need to use PostgreSQL or similar. Or even split the user base in several groups, to get several databases each one of adequate size for the existing software and hardware.
How does Skype, Google Talk, AIM... deal with that? Your experts will have to make some research.
And this is a rhetoric question, no need to answer: are you sure you will attract millions of concurrent users to your service (whatever it is) in short term (one or two years)? If you are so sure you probably have a bright and innovative idea.
You probably want to post your message on the JADMIN mailing list at too, so you get responses (or even more questions).