User Capacity

[snakeyes37]

Hi,

I know this question has probably been asked a million times already. I've tried searching in the forums for the answer but it seems that I cant really find what I'm looking for. Okay, I have a 6mbps/610kbps dsl connection, what is the best possible number of users I could realistically support while maintaining a smooth running server with minor problems?


The server would be running on a Windows XP Media Center Edition (yeah I know its Windows but I dont feel like fiddling around with Linux right now), a dual core 1.83GHz intel processor, and 1GB of memory. This is the best possible setup that I posses, unfourtnately I dont have the necessary funds for T1 connections, servers and all that fancy stuff. And btw, is there any possible way to keep the server running in a situation lets say where my computer suddenly has to be rebooted for some weird reason?


Thank you for your time.

[Stealth]

This question cannot be answered accurately. The answer in other threads was, there really is no answer.

From: http://forums.unrealircd.com/viewtopic.php?t=465

Bandwidth really depends on users/channels, like warez channels or RPG chats (and some other chats) use X times more traffic than average channels. Furthermore, I don't have much experience on it. What I do know is that the traffic itself usually is doable, but what is more important is how much "peak power" you have to handle attacks/splits/netjoins/etc.

The biggest thing to remember is, there are many variables. In theory, 1000 users could use next to no bandwidth at all. If you set the ping frequency to once an hour, and the clients all idle, you'll probably use no more than 1kb/s, if that. However, if you have 10 users who are flooding like crazy, they would use more than 1000 idling users. Basically, user count is only one variable. It's important, but it really isn't enough to determine a bandwidth usage.

As for machine power, again, there are other variables. If you have 1000 users, and 1 channel, you will use less memory than if you had 1000 channels. It's really hard to give numbers, we instead wind up doing like Syzop did and say "not much" or like tiko did and give your own experience. The only way to find out how much it will use in your case is to try it an see.

From http://forums.unrealircd.com/viewtopic.php?t=1264

This is all relative. I can make 5GB traffic/day with a single user. All it takes is a massive amount of flooding. I can also have 1Mb/day with 10000 users, they just all idle. 8Mb to me, sounds very small though. Think about it, an IRC message can be up to 512bytes. so 2 msgs = 1KB. 2048 msgs = 1MB, 16384 msgs = 8MB. Now, you say you have about 300-500 users, so dividing that by 400 (the middle), we get approx 41msgs per user per day.

Granted, most msgs are less than 512 bytes, but even so, maybe it makes it ~100msgs per user per day. That's not all that much. And lets not forget that SSL increases bandwidth by a lot. In all, I'd say it's normal. If you think it is too high, disabling SSL would probably cut it significantly.

I second that, 8mb/day (~240mb/month) doesn't sound much at all for me... But of course, 30 servers is a lot, so that helps spread the load

Also, I agree SSL can be quite costly, think of percentages of 20-25% overhead (for 100-200 bytes msgs, as low as 8% for stuff like 400 bytes msgs, so it depends), just wanted to mention some numbers here so people don't think it uses 2x as much bandwidth or anything .

From: http://forums.unrealircd.com/viewtopic.php?t=518

It's hard to predict.. As mentioned in another thread it depends on how your users chat, so there are like 2346293 factors here . Think: scripts (colors, popups), games, purpose of channel, how your channels are organized (1 big channel or rather tens of small channels), how often people talk in queries instead of channels, even things that might sound totally insane like the language people speak (some languages use 30% more bytes than english on avg).
My advice: since it seems you are just starting, just get your server online and play around... then after a while or when it's beginning to be laggy, link some more *DSL servers and/or switch to a shell (in quite some cases of <300 user nets you see both combined) [1].
Also as mentioned somewhere else... normal traffic might not be a problem, however when you get an attack (clones/zombies/whatever) you are pretty much guaranteed to go down (you might argue [D]DoS's can down pretty much any network, but with just filling up your 25kb/s upload it's of course a lot easier than attacking an X[X[X]]mbit box ;p)
Oh.. and probably stuff that's most important of all.. it depends what else you are doing on that line... it's not fun if all your users are lagging when you are ftp'ing something to your website! ;p

[1] Note that moving clients to another serverlink can easily save you a lot of bandwidth. If you have 50 clients and you move 20 to another server, and you have 1 big channel where everyone is in.. Then that means that for every text/join/part/etc.. you won't have to send that line 50x to everyone but rather 30x plus once to the serverlink (which can even be compressed [=recommended]).

[aquanight]

Like Stealth said, it's really hard to even just make a wild ass guesstimate. But I can say one thing for sure, that box better be patched and firewalled to hell and back or it won't stay up enough to get even 1 regular user ;) .

Also, computer reboot == server goes down, no way around it. It's just the way the internet works.

[SpaceDoG]

I also recommend you search for a shell account. They are cheap and offer good uptime. You don't have to worry about locking the box down because that's controlled by the shell administrator. Another thing you can also do is check out something like http://www.serverpronto.com where they give you full control (root acces) over your own dedicated box. They're cheap and good to work with the only drawback is that you have to secure/configure the box yourself. They'll install the OS of your choice but you have to lock it down.