[bigbluebutton-setup] About server hardware requirements

[shensman]

Based on calculations from FAQ section, If I'd have a typical
classroom (1 stream and 30 students) in a remote learning environment,
total traffic used after one hour is 4.3 GB. What if I have 100
classes simultaneously?
Can anybody give me an idea what kind of server I need to rent? RAM,
processor etc? Can a single server handle such large transactions?

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "BigBlueButton-Setup" group.
To post to this group, send email to bigbluebu...@googlegroups.com.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to bigbluebutton-s...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/bigbluebutton-setup?hl=en.

[Denis Zgonjanin]

A single server would not be able to handle 100 classes x 30 users each.

If only one person in the class is sharing the video stream, and everybody else is watching it and perhaps listening to audio as well, you could support a lot of users - probably a couple hundred simultaneously. But definitely not thousands.

We haven't done much work on scaling bbb over multiple servers. We do plan on doing that in the future, but it will probably be quite a few months ahead.

- Denis

[shensman]

Thanks, Denis.
In a typical class, only one person is sharing video stream at a time
and everybody else is watching and listening. They may need to switch
video sharing in the class.
For this typical scenario, you said a single server can handle
probably a couple of hundred simultaneous users. Do you have an exact
number? For this application, even 10 users will make huge difference
in terms of bandwidth.

[Denis Zgonjanin]

I don't have exact numbers, but some other people have ran BBB with a lot of users, maybe some of them will be able to offer hard numbers.

The bbb development team is working on making a single stand alone server more scalable, so the number of users a single server will support is always growing.

[shensman]

By the way, I didn't get those traffic calculation results from your
FAQ section:
http://code.google.com/p/bigbluebutton/wiki/FAQ#What_are_the_bandwidth_requirements_for_running_a_BigBlueButton

CALCULATIONS FROM FAQ:

* in: 1*40 = 40 Kbytes/sec incoming (e.g. 0.32 Mbit/sec)
* out: 1*(30-1)*40 = 1160 Kbytes/sec outgoing (e.g. 9.3 Mbit/sec)
* Total traffic used after one hour: 60 mins*60 secs*( 40 + 1160) =
4.3 GB

MY CALCULATIONS:
* in: 1*40 = 40 Kbytes/sec incoming (e.g. 40/128 = 0.31 Mbit/sec)
* out: 1*(30-1)*40 = 1160 Kbytes/sec outgoing (e.g. 1160/128 = 9.06
Mbit/sec)
* Total traffic used after one hour: 60 mins*60 secs*( 40 + 1160) =
4320000 Kbytes = 4.12 GB (4320000/1048576)


I could be wrong... the numbers are pretty close, but not match.

[Denis Zgonjanin]

Yea, the numbers vary by a little bit. One thing to note, we usually observe the bottleneck to be the bandwidth, not the CPU/memory. So you'll likely run out of bandwidth on the server before you run into problems of how many users a single server is able to support, unless you have a really great internet connection for your server.