[jdev] Jabber presence traffic characterization

[Dave Cridland]

On Mon Jun  9 12:06:27 2008, JabberForum wrote:
> @All: after the tips from the posts above, I managed to find the  
> IETF
> draft "Interdomain Presence Scaling Analysis for the Extensible
> Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP)" , at  
> http://tinyurl.com/5kbumc ,
> which contains some insightful analysis on the stanzas numbers and
> sizes. What I think is missing for a traffic characterization is the
> probability distribution to use for the time to send those stanzas.  
> With
> the information I and Jonathan manage to find from traffic analysis  
> I
> believe we'll manage to characterize well XMPP traffic between  
> clients
> and servers.

That's not a good draft to use, for a number of reasons.

Firstly, it's been written purely and simply as a contrast with  
SIP/SIMPLE, and shouldn't be read on its own.

Secondly, the status change (and therefore presence traffic) which  
the results are drawn from are thin-air figures - to my knowledge,  
they're not based on any real-world measurements, they were merely  
convenient figures which "felt" realistic for some unspecified  
scenarios.

Thirdly, this concentrates on S2S, rather than C2S, traffic - this  
may or may not be relevant, but I don't think it lends academic  
rigour to your thesis.

So for your purposes, these are almost exactly the wrong figures to  
use.

In my case, I can pull these figures out directly - overnight, when  
I'm not at my desk, I get 0 <presence/> stanzas up, and an average of  
0.003 <iq/> stanzas per second. (That's one every five minutes, and  
is actually a XEP-0199 ping being sent by the server to see if the  
client is still responsive).

Over approximately the same period, I get an average of 0.001  
<presence/> stanzas per second down - and the same number of <iq/>  
stanzas, of course.

I would hate to claim these figures were representative of anything -  
in particular, on that particular XMPP account, the majority of users  
in my roster are EU timezones.

Dave.
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