[Server-devel] Serving 400+ students w/ a single central XS - ejabberd nightmare?

[Martin Langhoff]

On Sun, Mar 8, 2009 at 7:52 PM, Bryan Berry <bryan at olenepal.org> wrote:
> But 200-300 users could be online at once. I think it will be too
> complicated to tell some of them: "Don't connect to the AP right now,
> you may overwhelm ejabberd"

Give ejabberd enough RAM and it won't be a problem. The rest of your
infrastructure will, however.


> The XS is quite a complicated ensemble of software having an XS at every
> school magnifies the administration work.

What admin work do you foresee on the XS?

> Additionally our schools only have about 8 hours of electricity per day.
> I am concerned about the XS losing power suddenly multiple times per
> day.

Good point. I've been building everything with daily "poweroffs" in
mind and every component should handle it. But haven't field-tested...

> we can provide that (RAM)

Have you go the 4GB barrier in mind? Past 4GB we get into all sorts of
problems. You'll need a 64-bit machine, and you'll have to convince me
or someone else to build a 64-bit XS iso rather than the vanilla
32-bit we're using now.

> We have a relatively low latency connection b/w the schools and the XS.

Low latency, high bandwidth and everyone in the same netblock? No
routers in the middle. That's what the XS assumes, in any case.

> the conclusion that Nepal has different requirements than some of the
> other pilot schools.

Everybody is a little bit special. By deviating from how the XS is
designed to be deployed, you will add mgmt work to workaround whatever
gotchas.

And you make the Nepal deployment less useful to me too :-(  -- you'll
probably have to setup routing and other things on the XS so that
you'll have to carefully debug it to ensure it's not your network
setup before reporting it here.

Naturally, it's your call to make. It looks to me like you're getting
into a tricky space with routing setup, potential 64-bit OS and other
curly issues. If the administrative workload you expect on the XS is
really big and tricky, then I'd agree with you...

(... but then, I'd like to know what's the big and tricky admin work
on the XS? my design principle that it should be
super-low-maintenance... )

cheers,



m
-- 
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 martin at laptop.org -- School Server Architect
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