Jitsi and mayfirst capacity

Technology Infrastructure and Services
1

Hi, marxmail.world is going to host its first forum on jitsi this month for a forum on deportations. I have a question: How does mayfirst manage capacity and ensure that we won’t have too many jitsi sessions on a particular server? How do we ensure that there is adequate capacity for our forum?

Thanks, Mark

Hola, marxmail.world va a organizar su primer foro en jitsi este mes para un foro sobre deportaciones. Tengo una pregunta: ¿Cómo gestiona mayfirst la capacidad y se asegura de que no tengamos demasiadas sesiones de jitsi en un servidor en particular? ¿Cómo nos aseguramos de que haya una capacidad adecuada para nuestro foro?

Gracias, Mark

2

Hi Mark, We don’t have a full proof method, but we do have some checks in place to make it manageable.

The main restriction is to the number of people who have a video connection - which is limited to just 8. Managing the video is by far the single biggest bottle neck and, since it’s exponential as more people turn on their video, a single meeting with lots of video can easily take down a server, but many meetings with less than 8 video participants is much easier to manage.

When most people are only connecting via audio, our server can handle a huge number of meetings and participants (I’m honestly not sure how many, we have never hit the limit).

This restriction alone allowed us to have meetings of up to 100 people without trouble, and that was when we allowed anyone in the world to start a meeting on our servers.

For the last year we were forced to limit meetings to just May First members, which means significantly fewer meetings are competing for resources at any one time.

In practice, last year we had two meetings with over 100 participants in the room and had no trouble at all.

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Hola Mark, no tenemos un método a toda prueba, pero sí algunos controles para que sea manejable.

La principal restricción es el número de personas que tienen conexión de vídeo, que está limitado a sólo ocho. La gestión del vídeo es, con diferencia, el mayor cuello de botella y, dado que es exponencial a medida que más personas activan el vídeo, una sola reunión con mucho vídeo puede colapsar fácilmente un servidor, pero muchas reuniones con menos de 8 participantes de vídeo son mucho más fáciles de gestionar.

Cuando la mayoría de la gente sólo se conecta por audio, nuestro servidor puede manejar un gran número de reuniones y participantes (honestamente no estoy seguro de cuántos, nunca hemos llegado al límite).

Sólo esta restricción nos ha permitido celebrar reuniones de hasta 100 personas sin problemas, y eso cuando permitíamos a cualquier persona del mundo iniciar una reunión en nuestros servidores.

El año pasado nos vimos obligados a limitar las reuniones a los miembros de May First, lo que significa que muchas menos reuniones compiten por los recursos en un momento dado.

En la práctica, el año pasado tuvimos dos reuniones con más de 100 participantes en la sala y no tuvimos ningún problema.

3

Thanks Jamie.
It is a problem for activist who migrate their information technology to mayfirst from Google/Microsoft/Zoom/Cisco: Special events need reliability and predictability. People spend hundreds of dollars and hundreds of hours to promote an event.

If mayfirst does not have elastic capacity like capitalist IT providers do, then we may need a “resource reservation system” whereby a member can reserve a two-hour session, say, on March 16 at 2:00 PM EST, and be assured that it won’t be bumped because the time slot was overbooked or because someone started an ad-hoc conferencing session that disrupted the reserved session that had been planned for weeks or months.

Mark

Gracias Jamie.
Es un problema para los activistas que migran su tecnología de la información de Google/Microsoft/Zoom/Cisco a Mayfirst: los eventos especiales necesitan confiabilidad y previsibilidad. La gente gasta cientos de dólares y cientos de horas para promocionar un evento.

Si Mayfirst no tiene capacidad elástica como la tienen los proveedores de TI capitalistas, entonces podríamos necesitar un “sistema de reserva de recursos” mediante el cual un miembro pueda reservar una sesión de dos horas, digamos, el 16 de marzo a las 2:00 p. m. EST, y tener la seguridad de que no se cancelará porque el horario estaba sobrevendido o porque alguien inició una sesión de conferencia ad hoc que interrumpió la sesión reservada que se había planeado durante semanas o meses.

Mark

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I think the issue works the other way around, it is not that May First guarantees its members that things work (which they do, the technical work is impeccable) but that the members and people who use the infrastructure understand that our infrastructure works with limits and that the desire is always to expand them, but the economic reality is our conditioner. We do not function as a private company that guarantees reliability or predictability, we function as a coop that guarantees mutual support and self-management.

I think the proposal of a “resource reservation system” is something that can be discussed; but I think it is even more important that we recognize the successful experiences that activists have had using the services of may first and jitsi in particular. From example, my collective Tadamun Antimili and the Latin American movement that promotes BDS we have never had our calls dropped and we remain confident in the use of the system. Perhaps we should ask about the experience of other organizations and see if they have had problems and how we can solve them.

Translated with DeepL.com (free version)

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5

Hi Oscar

Oscar wrote:

I think the issue works the other way around, it is not that May First guarantees its members that things work (which they do, the technical work is impeccable) but that the members and people who use the infrastructure understand that our infrastructure works with limits and that the desire is always to expand them, but the economic reality is our conditioner. We do not function as a private company that guarantees reliability or predictability, we function as a coop that guarantees mutual support and self-management.

My reply:
I agree with that, but I believe that we are most effective when our members are using our infrastructure to organize masses of people, most of whom will not be members. So if we offered an email service that correctly sent messages only 95% of the time, we would not know who we are reaching with our messages, and our organizing would suffer for it. We know that mayfirst does not have this problem and practically 100% of our email gets sent properly. Same with web. marxmail.world has moved our web services to mayfirst and will do the same with our email once I figure out a marxmail.world domain issue. I want to do the same with our last service to be moved, videoconferencing.

Oscar wrote:

I think the proposal of a “resource reservation system” is something that can be discussed; but I think it is even more important that we recognize the successful experiences that activists have had using the services of may first and jitsi in particular.

My reply:
It works great. Please don’t take my suggestions as criticisms. And I would be willing to work on a resource reservation system for videoconferencing if we decide to prioritize that.

Oscar wrote:

From example, my collective Tadamun Antimili and the Latin American movement that promotes BDS we have never had our calls dropped and we remain confident in the use of the system. Perhaps we should ask about the experience of other organizations and see if they have had problems and how we can solve them.

My reply:
I have been using it for weeks and agree. But I have worked on video delivery since 1992 and have seen resource contention first hand. I know that it can be avoided by advance reservation. It may be that I cannot get my meeting reserved on March 16 at 1400 US EST, and that’s fine because we understand the limitations that our coop necessarily faces. We might hold on a different day. But to schedule a forum or mass meeting and not find out if there is enough capacity until the meeting starts, that I would like to avoid.

thanks, Mark

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I think maybe can work in an other way, reserving some of the infrastructure only if you are organizing a meeting of around or more than 100 people. That way we can find ways to prioritize for eventual meeting… I believe more of the meetings have less attendance and you dont have to reserve for that. Maybe thinking on an special jitsi meeting room for large attendance. Just a thinking. But I do not know if this is possible.

7

Oscar’s first reply really resonates with me Mark. I think you are asking us to optimize for a problem you haven’t experienced yet. It would be great if we could always plan for all possible disaster scenarios but our limited resources often mean we have to prioritize working on the known problems first.

But I understand your concern and it isn’t unreasonable to think we might saturate our Jitsi server’s capacity someday. If we boil this down you would like us to implement a reservation system for Jitsi to ensure the majority of resources are prioritized towards a single meeting. Essentially this means limiting the size and number of other meetings that can happen at a given time. On a purely technical level this does not yet exist. It is not something built into Jitsi. I’m not convinced this is the best solution or in line with our values but even if we agreed to build this we definitely couldn’t have this ready in time for the meeting you’ve already scheduled.

If the unknown risk is to large and potentially damaging to your organizing efforts you should consider contracting another paid service that can provide those guarantees. Consider Meet Coop https://www.meet.coop/ or 8x8 https://jaas.8x8.vc (8x8 is the company that sponsors Jitsi development). Either way you would still be encouraging people to use an open source alternative to Zoom which is still in line with May First’s goals even if you choose not to use our infrastructure.

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Thanks Jaime. If or when we do experience it, I have some ideas that we might try.

Mark

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Just a thinking.

me:

That’s all I’m doing, just thinking. And I think that you are right about my requirement: If there was a need for video reservations, you, jamie, jamiev, and others would have heard about it by now. As we grow, future members might need service guarantees for cases when they can’t afford a failed meeting of 100+ people, or for cases where a failed meeting would badly disrupt the movement at a critical moment. It may also be a problem if a member is organizing as part of a united front, rather than organizing an internal meeting for a member organization. But it may or may not be a future requirement for mayfirst.org. jaimev listed some jitsi-based providers who already do that.

thanks, Mark

p.s. To correct my earlier message: If we ever do need guaranteed services in the future, a “resource reservation system” that I suggested would be the wrong approach. I think the cheaper way to do it today is to buy a virtual machine from a provider when more capacity is temporarily needed. If our members ever need that, presumably the member would pay the additional price - just thinking.

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