Memory requirements for ~100 concurrent users

[babaggeii]

We run live debates of over 100 concurrent users. Currently we use a LAMP system where we just limit the number of possible connections.

How would you go about managing this for a NodeBB system? As I understand it, it uses sockets so that you stay connected? Does this mean that you need very large memory resources for high numbers of concurrent users?

[julian]

Hi @babaggeii, nice to see you back

As far as I know, the memory requirements of maintaining 100 concurrent connections is still quite minimal. A 2-4 core VPS should come with more than enough memory to handle it.

Unfortunately, I don't have any hard numbers on this...

[babaggeii]

@julian Thanks very much for that. I'm going to set up a forum and do some testing in parallel to our current system. Maybe I'll publish results if they're interesting.

[julian]

@babaggeii We'd love to see them! Please do.

[Nivix]

@babaggeii I would be very interested in seeing those numbers as well.

Just a note, NodeBB has excellent scaling abilities. If you find that your debate forum is a bit sluggish try manually bumping the clustering to two instances. You can read more about this feature in the docs.

[hek]

We average at around 100 online users on a 1 core 1GB Ram 30GB SSD Disk VPS (DigitaOcean).

This is a 24h chart of CPU utilization. Average at about 5%... which leaves room for much more users.

[aixnr]

@hek if you don't mind, how this graph was generated? Looks neat.

[hek]

It is a screenshot from DigitalOceans droplet admin interface. They provide a few graphs of thing they can monitor from the "outside" like bandwidth, disk and CPU.

[julian]

@Nivix Nice to see my scaling guide mentioned

Will add more to it if I remember... @baris @psychobunny and I spent most of September scaling up NodeBB, but the majority of the changes were merged straight into core, so if you have v0.5.1, you've already got 'em!

[babaggeii]

@hek Excellent, just what I was looking for. Are you caching requests?

[hek]

@babaggeii

What do you mean by caching requests?

We don't have cloudflare in front of it. Their websocket support is too expensive for this open source project community forum.

But we do have a nginx (on the same droplet) proxying requests.

[Nivix]

@julian I've got to say--the documentation for NodeBB is why I chose it over Discourse. There are still some docs lacking (and I know since the platform has not reached a full "1.0" version we should not expect full docs)...but the fact that you guys have put work into writing some documentation is great.

Thanks so much!