Planning an installation of BigBlueButton

[Brandon Zylstra]

I have a question about server planning for BigBlueButton.

As far as I know at the moment, the maximum number of users online at any one time will be less than 500, so with that in mind, here are the different server roles I envision:

- Scalelite Server in a Docker container
- Greenlight (Docker again of course)
- BBB1: on its own VM with at least 8 GB & 4 cores
- BBB2: on its own VM with at least 8 GB & 4 cores

- BBB3: on its own VM with at least 8 GB & 4 cores

- Postgres server: in a Docker container with at least 2 GB & 2 cores available
- Redis: in a Docker container with at least 0.5 GB & 2 cores available

Would it be a bad idea to combine Greenlight, Scalelite, Postgres, & Redis onto 1 server, as long as each container has the minimum specs available?

(I realize there will have to be testing before I can know for sure how many users I can handle with any given set of servers, but does this seem like a good starting point?)

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Brandon Zylstra
brandon...@gmail.com

[DistanceLearning.cloud]

The 4 cores will not adequately handle a bunch of meeting starts at the top of an hour, with presentation upload conversions happening while users are joining multiple meetings.   Also,  if recording is enabled audio quality will suffer when recordings are processing.   It may run,  but not optimum.. 

regards,

Stephen

[Brandon Zylstra]

Thanks! 

There's no plan to record anything at this point, and probably at most 15% will require presentations being used.  In the cases where presentations are used, it is planned to be done through screen sharing, so there should be zero conversions taking place.  Does that change things significantly? 

So would the main thing you would change be to have more than 4 cores for each BBB server?

Does combining Postgres, Redis, Scalelite, and Greenlight onto one VM sound okay? Do they need to be in their own containers? 

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Brandon Zylstra

Sent from my iPhone

On May 27, 2023, at 7:52 AM, DistanceLearning.cloud <sd...@distancelearning.cloud> wrote:

The 4 cores will not adequately handle a bunch of meeting starts at the top of an hour, with presentation upload conversions happening while users are joining multiple meetings.   Also,  if recording is enabled audio quality will suffer when recordings are processing.   It may run,  but not optimum.. 

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[Fred Dixon]

Hi there,

> - BBB1: on its own VM with at least 8 GB & 4 cores

Recommend you review the minimum server requirements

  https://docs.bigbluebutton.org./administration/install#minimum-server-requirements

and setup your servers with 16G/8CPU cores (minimum).  For docker deployment of ScaleLite, see

  https://github.com/blindsidenetworks/scalelite/blob/master/docker-README.md

Each BigBlueButton server should handle a minimum of 200 users, see 

  https://docs.bigbluebutton.org./support/faq#how-many-simultaneous-users-can-bigbluebutton-support

Regards,.. Fred

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Co-founder BigBlueButton

http://bigbluebutton.org/

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[Brandon Zylstra]

Thanks for pointing out the error, but that was not the main focus of the questions.

I wrote that up that list while looking at the Scalelite docs, and accidentally took the BBB minimums from the Scalelite minimums.  (The link to the BBB minimums was broken, and at some point in making my list I mixed them up.)  Just replace those specs with "minimum requirements"

I'm more interested in whether this overall approach is good.  To make my questions more explicit & clear, and all in one place:

1. Does it generally make more sense to use Scalelite with multiple (minimal) BBB servers or is it better to just use a single and much beefier BBB server and forget about Scalelite?

2. Is there any practical difference whether Postgres, Redis, Scalelite, and Greenlight are on the same VM or separate VM?

3. How "minimal" are the minimum requirements?  Are they going to give an adequate experience or will things just barely function?

4. How much do these factors affect things:

    a. nothing will be recorded 

    b. 85% of the time there will be no presentations

    c. when there are presentations, there won't be any conversion necessary

If the only problem is the mistaken minimum requirements copied from the wrong place, then this should be good, but I'd love an explicit answer to the questions asked. 

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Brandon Zylstra
brandon...@gmail.com

[Fred Dixon]

Hi Brandon,

We (the core developers) would not recommend running any BigBlueButton server in production without meeting the minimum requirements.  

There were times in the past we would get posts in the forum where some strange issue was happening in BigBlueButton, and it was happening very unpredictably.  After sometimes a lot of back and forth, we would finally discover the author of the posts was running BigBlueButton in a constrained manner.  Under such circumstances, a random part of BigBlueButton would bottleneck or fail, and end-users would see degraded performance.  The solution was to run BigBlueButton with the minimum recommended requirements.

At 500 users, you could try running BigBlueButton on a single 32 G/16 CPU core server and adjust the number of front-ends and back-ends for note, see

 

  https://docs.bigbluebutton.org./administration/customize

but then everything is dependent on a single server.  

> 1. Does it generally make more sense to use Scalelite with multiple (minimal) BBB servers or is it better to just use a single and much beefier BBB server and forget about Scalelite?

Yes to ScaleLite. By investing in some up-front work with ScaleLite, you'll have a more scalable, reliable, and upgradable infrastructure.

Regards,... Fred

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[Jean Pluzo]

Hi Brandon,

I'll try to answer your questions one by one:

1. This depends on your needs. SL is for load balancing, which will handle many, many users separating them in different rooms/servers. If you need to only host one single meeting with many users, SL will not help. How exactly will your BBB deployment be? (question for you to think about).

2. I don't understand what you mean by "practical difference". By reading your past posts I guess you want to integrate all containers (pgres, redis, GL, SL) into one VM/Machine. This is doable and feasible. We have such a setup: one VM running SL, GL, redis, postgres and some other in-house solutions. Everything containerized. We haven't had any performance problems. Server has 8 CPUs and 16 GB of RAM, although I guess it could be done with only 4 CPUs. It's tricky, but it can be done.
3. Again, what exactly do you want to achieve? Minimal is always minimal, but in my experience BBB runs pretty well on these minimal requirements.

4. In my experience these are minimal factors, but your mileage may vary.

Test, test, test to achieve your desired goal!

Regards,

J.

[Brandon Zylstra]

Thanks! That's very helpful.

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Brandon Zylstra
brandon...@gmail.com