[hydra-dev] Scalability

[John Todd]

On Jun 18, 2010, at 6:52 AM, Ed Guy wrote:

> Do we have any thoughts about the scalability of a hydra system?
>
> is it efficient at any level from 1 subscriber to 10 billion?
>
> or do we start above the single asterisk box, say at 1000 subscribers
> And the max, 10 Million subs?
>
> This, of course, is an old school way of looking at things, BUT, it  
> is a
> place to start.
>
> Any thoughts on concurrent sessions?
>
> or other scaling metrics?
>
>
> /ed



Well, I think it's close to being reasonable.  However, I'm uncertain  
if "subscribers" is the right measure.  I'd say "channels" or "active  
communications" or something a bit less oriented towards a commercial  
relationship and more to a functional expectation.  A "subscriber" is  
someone who has some unknown amount of idle time, and with new  
versions of communications popping up that have unknown maximum busy  
hour transactions (chat, video, smell-o-vision) we can't really base  
the system on future unexpected user behaviors.  We perhaps may wish  
to use instead a count of active communications paths...?

This brings into question how asynchronous communications are counted,  
and I'm not sure how to consider that.  Maybe our concept of  
"channels" is based on the idea of 'communication packets flowing at  
least once per second' or some measurement like that.  But I don't  
want to fall too deep in that rathole when an 80/20 rule will work  
quite well here (but I'm not sure that "subscribers" is an 80/20- 
compatible number, which is why I comment here.)

JT


---
John Todd                       email:jtodd at digium.com
Digium, Inc. | Asterisk Open Source Community Director
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