[JDEV] Server Scalability

[gejones at cwcom.net]

We're looking to use Jabber as our Instant Messaging solution and scalability
seems the only issue which causes concern. Maybe we've missed something. Perhaps
you can help.

We have many worldwide ISP's each of which has at least one x.500 directory
to store user information. LDAP is commonly used by our applications to query
this directory. Writing an LDAP authentication module for Jabber seems fairly
straighforward and we'll release this under GPL to the jserver team when completed.


Each of our worldwide ISP's needs to support in the range of 10 million customers
using Instant Messaging (not all online at one time thank goodness!).

The distribution architecture used by Jabber is fine for routing information
between ISP's, but a Jabber server running on a single box will nowhere near
support our required concurrency at each site.

We don't want to use different domains for each server at a single site as this
will become unmanageable in future. Is there a way of clustering machines to
act as a single Jabber server?

We have done this in the past using an application-layer switch to load-balance
between a number of servers, but the application itself obviously needs to understand
what's going on.

Your help would be appreciated.

Best Regards
Gareth E. Jones