[JDEV] [jadmin] Jabber research

[Smith, Jeffery S (Scott)]

Hello

I've been tasked with researching the use of jabber in a corporate messaging
environment. These lists seem like a good place to continue my research
after reviewing the jabber.org site.

The nutshell view of the project is that there will be approximately
6000-7000 jabber clients communicating with one server or cluster of
servers. Each client (client software will be written in-house) will connect
and remain connected, and if the connection is lost the client will
immediately attempt to reconnect. Therefore, the number of concurrent
connections and the maximum number of users is identical.

Message traffic is estimated to range from 100-2000 messages per day per
system, with the average being in the 200-300 range and the average message
size being 1-2K.

The servers and the clients will be linux systems, by corporate edict either
Red Hat 8.0 or Advanced Server 2.1, running on IBM x345 Dual P4 2.0 GHz
servers with 2 GB RAM.

On the client side, the jabber client will be written as a daemon process,
with an API published to the client applications. This will not be a typical
user-interactive IM client, but will be application activated to send
messages, and will activate applications upon receipt of messages.

Questions:

How many concurrent connections of the type and traffic specified could I
expect the x345 server to support? Assume bandwidth is not an issue. I've
seen the limitations regarding stock RH installs vis a vis number of ports
and so forth. Should we plan for 1000 connections per system? More? 500?
Less?

Are there advantages or disadvantages to running multiple servers, even if a
single server could service all connections? Does jabber provide redundancy
or failover facilities? Is disaster recovery or server replacement unusually
difficult?

What happens if an unusually large messages passes through a server? For
example, if a 10MB or 100MB message passes through a jabber server, can the
client/server handle messages of that size? And if so, are other sessions
queued until this one message completes, or is there concurrency?

On the client side, are there any "client daemon" projects currently
available or under development for the linux environment?

On the server side, is it possible and if so how difficult is it to have
messages received at the server passed through to an application rather than
to another jabber client? I understand such hooks exist from my reading of
the jabberd docs, but a confirmation would be nice.

Is there a jabber-to-email gateway? For example, can a jabber client send a
message to an email address rather than to another jabber client, and vice
versa?

Thanks in advance. If anyone can provide high level answers it would be
appreciated. I need only enough detail to answer the question.
Implementation details and suggestions are not needed at this point, only a
statement of possibility and perhaps an indication of difficulty or
viability.

Thanks again,

Scott
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