BigBlueButton Server Requirements

[Carl Gosselin]

Hello,

I've installed BigBlueButton on a Digital Ocean droplet (virtual server).  I chose the 40$/ month with the following attributes:

- 8 GB / 4 CPUs

- 160 GB SSD disk

- 5 TB transfer

Everything is working well at the moment.  Is there a log (and system performance indicators) I can review on a regular basis that would let me know when the system is close to overload and look to upgrade to another D.O. plan?

Carl

[Fred Dixon]

Hi Carl,

BigBlueButton is a CPU intensive application.  You will likely hit the limit of CPU before memory or bandwidth.

When your server is under load, check the CPU utilization to see if it's under 80%. If it goes over, you should upgrade to a higher CPU capacity Digital Ocean instance.

Regards,... Fred

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "BigBlueButton-dev" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to bigbluebutton-...@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to bigblueb...@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/bigbluebutton-dev.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

--

BigBlueButton Developer

http://bigbluebutton.org/

@bigbluebutton

[Pablo Pico]

Hello Carl,

Could you give me some aproximate of the capacity (and if they are using webcam or not) you achieved with this D.O. doplet?
I understand this is a dedicated cpu droplet.
I am trying to estimate the capacity that droplet and how much it could vary when using webcams or not.
I will give you my feedback once we have it installed.

At first we ran some tests in a droplet like this

8 GB 4 vCPUs 5 TB 160 GB $40/mo (shared cpu)
around 100 users (about 12 with webcam) processing was 80% aprox so i learned that processing was going to be our fist limitation. After reading bbb recommendation about using bare metal instead of virtualization because of dedicated cpu i figured out that using a cpu optimized droplet would be a better approach (dedicated cpu)

My next step is to find out how does a 4cpu droplet do compared to a 8cpu

I appreciate any feedback you may have on your droplet.
Also i think digital ocean panel on cpu usage is sufficent for you t have an idea of your capacity (it should be under 80%). 
Also reading other posts i concluded that at some point it is better to have more than one bbb server than upgrading a single server. This is specially true in digital ocean's case because at some point bandwith will be the hard limit since D.O. does not offer dedicated bandwith. Meaning that is probably better to have 2 "8 VCPUs" servers than 1 "16 vCPUs"

[Carl Gosselin]

Hi Pablo,

because D.O. cannot guarantee dedicated bandwidth we are in the process of moving away from D.O.  I think you are on the right path in setting up multiple servers for BBB (we are in the process of doing the same).  Some of our clients have noticed latency issues with the whiteboard, video, and audio during peak times of the day.  Another challenge I have with D.O. is that it took about 9 hours to backup a server (700+ GB in size due to accumulating recordings).  My server wasn't going to last another day without re-sizing so I had to call them to cancel the snapshot so that I could increase the size of my server before people started logging in again.

[Pablo Pico]

Hi Carl
Thanks for your reply!

but i would like to know around how many simultaneous users you could handle with that 40USD droplet?
and if possible specify and aprox fo this users using webcam.

[German Acevedo]

Hi Pablo,

I'm running a BBB Server with dedicated hardware at Hetzner, with the following specs:

Intel® Core™ i7-6700 Quad-Core
incl. Hyper-Threading Technology

RAM:	64 GB DDR4
Hard drive:	2 x 4 TB SATA Enterprise hard drive 7200 rpm (software-RAID 1)
Connection:	1 GBit/s port
Guaranteed bandwidth:	1 GBit/s
Backup space:	100 GB
Traffic:	Unlimited *

This is priced at Euro 40.46 / month.

With this server we have handled:

• 19 simultanenous sessions
• 120 users connected in these sessions
• 18 users sharing their webcam
• 54 users sharing their microphone

With this load the performance of the server is:

CPU Usage: 80 - 90% (none of the users have reported any issue with the audio or video)

RAM Usage: 20 - 25%

I know that you are looking for information of droplets, but maybe this could be of interest too.

Regards,

German Acevedo

#QuédateEnCasa

#StayAtHome

[Carl Gosselin]

Hi Pablo,

We moved away from the $40 plan quite a while ago as people were experiencing a lot of quality issues.  We are now on a DO plan that has 20CPUs (shared CPU unfortunately - bad mistake), 2TB SSD, and 96GB of RAM on a single server (another bad mistake).  We've learned a lot along the way and we are moving to a new environment and avoiding past mistakes.  We are currently following the BigBlueButton Scalelite documentation and moving to AWS.

[Wes]

I noticed they don't offer to install Ubuntu 16.04. What are you running? How long has your instance of BBB been up? Have you had any issues?

[Kenwrick Chan]

Folks,
I was under the impression that BigBlueButton needed server hardware
vs a VM since freeswitch works better with hardware. Is that no
longer the case?

kenwrick

[Fred Dixon]

Hi Kenwrick,

I personally think you'll always get better performance from dedicated hardware, but many of the major cloud providers now offer compute intensive VMs that give you dedicated CPUs.  

On Amazon EC2, for example, you can now get c5.2xlarge instances that are very close to bare metal.  On Digital Ocean they have their CPU-Optimized instances.  Other other cloud providers have similar offerings.

If you do try out a VM, avoid the general purpose VMs as they have higher "steal time" and are not ideal for applications like FreeSWITCH which is mixing the audio in real-time.

  https://opensource.com/article/20/1/cpu-steal-time

Regards,... Fred

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/bigbluebutton-dev/CAEWiB0Z9RsG7mEByJO0a6Qp3w%2BwRqsRF7kkFenFh%2Bf7gkCE4kg%40mail.gmail.com.

--

BigBlueButton Developer

http://bigbluebutton.org/

Like BigBlueButton?  Tweet us at @bigbluebutton

[Kenwrick Chan]

Thanks Fred!

kenwrick

> To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/bigbluebutton-dev/CAOeuy5Nv5%2ByMc24Ncxfh2-%3DOTV4hp4MRdb0LQyzfg7zKeAac0g%40mail.gmail.com.

[Pablo Pico]

Hello German, Thanks for sharing and your detailed report!
120 simultaenous users is less than the minimal required hardware can handle according to documentation (it says at least 150 wil be handled) 

However you say it is already hitting 80% of cpu. Depending on hou you mesaured it it could b 80% / 4 = 20% or 80% average for all cores... so i was wondering. 
If quality is good i suppose you have not hit your full capacity.

[German Acevedo]

Hi,

When I order the server I ask for it to be delivered in "Recovery mode", and then use the installimage where they have available the Ubuntu 16.04 distribution. (https://wiki.hetzner.de/index.php/Installimage/en).

I have 4 BigBlueButton servers all running without any problem.

Regards,

German Acevedo

#QuédateEnCasa

#StayAtHome

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to a topic in the Google Groups "BigBlueButton-dev" group.
To unsubscribe from this topic, visit https://groups.google.com/d/topic/bigbluebutton-dev/6PbS-QxNiqs/unsubscribe.
To unsubscribe from this group and all its topics, send an email to bigbluebutton-...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/bigbluebutton-dev/e6f67bfb-e7f8-4480-b8f9-96e529de478e%40googlegroups.com.

[German Acevedo]

Hi Pablo,

Thanks for your feedback.

The CPU usage is what is reported on the dashboard of Webmin.  I have now installed in my server nmon to monitor the individual core usage, and will be monitoring it when it raises in Webmin.

I have seen that the recording processing is reporting something like 150% of cpu usage, so I believe there are at least 2 threads of the cpu working on the recording almost at any time due to the hign ammount of meetings being recorded each day.

Regards,

German Acevedo

[Alex]

I honestly envy anyone  here who managed to make it work on a VPS or a VPS with 100% dedicated cores.

We've always had distortions running BBB in virtualization environment.(KVM)

[Betim Gashi]

I runn all BBB servers as Virtual Machines over Microsoft Hyper-V without a problem and I believe you can make same with KVM Linux Virtualization without a problem even KVM will be better for linux.

So I dont understand why people have so much problems with Virtual Machines a.k.a VM or VPS.

[Wes]

Thanks for the reply. I did the same and got it up and running through recovery and installing the 16.04 distribution image. I am having trouble configuring an SSL using:

wget -qO- https://ubuntu.bigbluebutton.org/bbb-install.sh | bash -s -- -v xenial-200 -s (host name) -e (email)

Failed authorization procedure. (host name) (http-01): urn:ietf:params:acme:error:connection :: The server could not connect to the client to verify the domain :: During secondary validation: Fetching (host name)/.well-known/acme-challenge/L0jJD7xj05V0ibgSxp-fOgANGb2zCqVheIthMnMwr4Y?from=@: Connection reset by peer

- The following errors were reported by the server:

 

   Domain: (host name)

   Type:   connection

   Detail: During secondary validation: Fetching

   (host name) /.well-known/acme-challenge/L0jJD7xj05V0ibgSxp-fOgANGb2zCqVheIthMnMwr4Y?from=@:

   Connection reset by peer

 

   To fix these errors, please make sure that your domain name was

   entered correctly and the DNS A/AAAA record(s) for that domain

   contain(s) the right IP address. Additionally, please check that

   your computer has a publicly routable IP address and that no

   firewalls are preventing the server from communicating with the

   client. If you're using the webroot plugin, you should also verify

   that you are serving files from the webroot path you provided.

 - Your account credentials have been saved in your Certbot

   configuration directory at /etc/letsencrypt. You should make a

   secure backup of this folder now. This configuration directory will

   also contain certificates and private keys obtained by Certbot so

   making regular backups of this folder is ideal.

cp: cannot stat '/tmp/bigbluebutton.bak': No such file or directory

bbb-install: Let's Encrypt SSL request for (host name) did not succeed - exiting

Does this have to do with Hetzner's firewall? Or did I mess something up in my DNS settings?

I know I was having some trouble with UDP ports earlier and had to create a rule in my hetzner account top open them up, but is there something else I need to open or do?

To unsubscribe from this group and all its topics, send an email to bigblueb...@googlegroups.com.