#1 2008-09-02 19:01:13

**_AgentK_**

Installation/Setup capacity planning

Hi all,

I'm currently planning a licensed Connect setup for a res. large govt department client of us. I'm wondering if there is any capacity planning document around for version 7 which helps and provide guidelines to figure out hardware/cluster requirements for a Connect system with - let's say - 25, 50, 100, 250, 500 etc. concurrent users?

If there is nothing - anyone around who's got some experiences to share? :)

Cheers
Kai

**_Jorma_at_RealEyes_**

Re: Installation/Setup capacity planning

Each Connect Server can handle up to 500 concurrent connections.

**_AgentK_**

Re: Installation/Setup capacity planning

Hi Jorma,

thanks, I know of that upper limit of 500 concurrent connections, but that is obviously a technical design limitation and has nothing to do with performance and capacity planning.

I can't believe that any machine spec'ed to the installation requirements would be able to support anything from 25 to 500 concurrent users equally good. There must be some guidelines pointing to a bit of a more granular capacity planning?

Cheers
Kai

**_michael_**

Re: Installation/Setup capacity planning

I believe the upper limit of 500 concurrent users has more to do with socket limitations of the OS than Connect itself, but:

In terms of capacity planning:  you do need to take into account what these users will be doing inside their meetings.  Different features have greater impact on CPU utilization, for example, than others.  Video/VoIP/Screensharing will be more CPU intensive than general chat and slide-flipping after conversions.  All that said, I would urge you to make it easy on yourself:

Buy a box with 3-4GB of RAM, at least a dual-core CPU, a 1GB NIC, and plenty of fast disk and you'll be fine up to 400-500.  With a single box, you aren't going to get fail-over, so I would monitor your concurrency levels closely, and if you do continue to approach 350-400, start thinking seriously about adding another server and building out a clustered-deployment for failover.  Offload your DB if at possible as well.  Same goes for SSL.

One last item that many organizations overlook:  think about your network requirements.  If someone in your organization decides to perform an ego-cast to 500 people with VoIP/High-Quality Video/Screensharing, you're likely to see 300-500Kb/s per attendee...  One of our customers holds events in the 300-400 user range, and they tend to sustain at around 40-50Mb/s, with peaks significantly higher than those numbers.  Networks, in our experience, start to get flaky when exceeding 50% of capacity, so plan accordingly.