FEderating bbb-servers for large konference

[An Frm]

Hi,

for the school i work at, i'm running 3 bbb servers with a scalelite server as loadbalancer. The System is working fine now.

Is there a way to link the 3 servers to be able to host an event with several hundred of listeners and a few speakers? I could imagine a setup, where the speakers join a session on one server, which serves a part of the listeners and sends the streams to the other 2 servers, which replicate the streams for the rest of the participants. Is something like that feasible?

Best regards

Andreas

[basisbit]

Hello Andreas,

this is currently not supported using only BigBlueButton and, as far as I know, there are no developers working on this.

Currently depending on choice of server hardware and system configuration, meetings up to approximately 400 participants can be done using BBB. However, for anything bigger than 150 participants, I'd suggest using a video-live-streaming solution instead. Those systems usually support an origin-edge architecture and thus support streaming the video of the conference to thousands of users concurrently.

The easiest way would be to just run Open broadcaster Software (OBS) on one computer that streams the video to Twitch/YouTube/... or your own service (OwnCast is great for this), and then the view-only participants get to see the video stream (with chat if you want) on your website.

[German Acevedo]

Hi,
We are having the anual meeting of our medical association in about 2 weeks, and have 380 participants already signed up.

I am wondering if we can have a single meeting where all the participants can join just as listeners, allowing only to chat at the end of each lecture.
There will be only 1 webcam and possibly screen sharing during some lectures, but we expect that most of the lectures will have a pdf presentation.

We are looking to setup BigBlueButton on a bare metal server with the following specs:

• AMD Ryzen 7 3700X Octa-Core "Matisse" (Zen2)
• 64 GB DDR4 ECC RAM
• 2 x 1 TB NVMe SSD (Software-RAID 1)
• 1 Gbit/s bandwidth

So you believe that we can use BigBlueButton (We love this) for this conference or should we go with another system like Zoom (we don't like it!)?

Thanks in advance for any guidance on this!

[basisbit]

I'd suggest you to contact a BBB server provider from your region of the world, who has experience with how to set up servers for high amounts of concurrent users in single sessions.

It can be done when using mediasoup instead of kurento (requires 2.4 or 2.5) and tweaking freeswitch and adjusting ephemeral ports count and tweaking nodejs process count & config, and limiting frame rates and bit rates of webcam & screen share and disabling features that are not strictly needed and entirely disabling recording and reducing logging, disabling/hiding meeting participants list, adjusting nginx config, properly setting up a turn server on another machine for it and possibly other modifications that I forgot here right now.

I am not sure if your 8-cpu-cores @ 3.6GHz and up to 1Gb/s uplink server (at some data center with reliable network?) can do that job for your use case, but would guess that it should work well after applying the right config and after testing it and getting experience with it.

Also, as written previously:

> However, for anything bigger than 150 participants, I'd suggest using a video-live-streaming solution instead. Those systems usually support an origin-edge architecture and thus support streaming the video of the conference to thousands of users concurrently.

> The easiest way would be to just run Open Broadcaster Software (OBS) on one computer that streams the video to Twitch/YouTube/... or your own service (OwnCast is great for this), and then the view-only participants get to see the video stream (with chat if you want) on your website. 

HLS makes it very easy to use Cloudflare or BunnyCDN to distribute your video stream to thousands of viewers concurrently.

Please also read the official BBB documentation regarding this: https://docs.bigbluebutton.org/support/faq.html#how-many-simultaneous-users-can-bigbluebutton-support  

[German Acevedo]

Thank you Basisbit,

I see that it's not an easy task to tweak BBB to do the job.

I will explore OwnCast as your recommendation.

Regards,

German

[Thierry Kauffmann]

Hi,

We are operating servers for many clients.

We managed to gather up to 500 participants in a single meeting with two active webcams and other participants listening.

The server specs are as follow :

KVM virtual machine

16 cores

64 GB RAM

50 GB NVMe SSD

1.5 Gbps bandwitdh

Kind regards,

Thierry - www.arawa.fr