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

[Bryan Berry]

On Mon, 2009-03-09 at 22:36 -0400, Daniel Drake wrote:
> 2009/3/9 Bryan Berry <bryan at olenepal.org>:
> > We will have roughly 8+ AP's. We have found that off-the-shelf AP's can
> > handle around 60-70 users.  But that doesn't still doesn't solve the
> > problem of the XO's getting bogged down by tons of ejabberd chatter.
> >
> > DSD: do you have any ideas about this?
> 
> Have only had a chance to test numbers on Linksys WRT54Gsomething
> routers, which stop accepting new connections after 33 users. yay.

The linksys is WRT54G total crap. We don't use them. We have found that
cheaper AP's do much better. We have good luck w/ random Taiwanese
brands like Compex, Lantech, and AZTech. They have Atheros or RealTek
chipsets

> I haven't seen XO's bogged down by ejabberd chatter. Ran 75 today
> while monitoring the TX/RX stats on the LAN interface on the XS and
> was impressed at how low it was.
> 
> Yes, the XOs run slow when you view a busy neighborhood view, but it's
> fine as soon as you switch away. There was a bug where sugar updates
> every icon on the neighborhood view 10 times every second when you are
> on that screen (but only when you are on that screen), it's fixed for
> 0.84.

I saw it drop as well when I changed out of the Network View, but it
still remained fairly high w/ 200 very active users, too high to keep me
from launching EToys

> > That's great, but our pilot starts in a month but that doesn't fit our
> > timeline. I don't want to send out a completely new, untested XS into
> > rural parts of Nepal.
> 
> I tried and didn't get any feedback from XS usage in large
> deployments, so we pretty much figured we'd send it into not-as-rural
> paraguay and find out what happens (we don't really have any other
> options!).
> 
> Daniel

I think that is because large deployments like Uruguay aren't using the
XS and others like Mongolia don't have the technical expertise to
monitor such things.

That leaves new "large" deployments like Paraguay and Nepal in an
unenviable position as pioneers.

-- 
Bryan W. Berry
Technology Director
OLE Nepal, http://www.olenepal.org