Event description

The main part of the Tigase server development is testing. Actually I spend much more time on testing the server in different scenarios than on writing the actual code.

Most of the tests can be run locally on the development machine. Performance tests and especially load tests require more hardware but usually the development machine as a client and one mor as the server is enough.

One category of tests however require more hardware to be involved and in the best case scenario that hardware should be always on to see how the software behaves over the longer period of time. Clustering tests. They require ideally 3 machines for the server deployment. I run automated tests on the Tigase server very often and also this clustered installation is available to the public at the address: xmpp-test.tigase.org. By running it for a long time and exposing it to the public I can catch many exceptional cases and fix problems which don't appear on short automatic test runs.

At the moment I use 3 machines which are always turned on. Unfortunately 2 of them are very old hardware which have started to refuse working more and more often. Therefore I am looking at replacing them with something different. Ideally it would be low power consumption machine with at least 512MB RAM. There is even no hard disk needed as the system could be started from USB stick or DVD disk. It could be also a laptop with at least single core Pentium M 1.5GHz and 512MB RAM.

If you have such a hardware and can offer it to the project I would very much appreciate your help. Please send me a message using the contact form, or via email/xmpp at the address: kobit AT tigase.org to discuss details. 

We are not moving project tracker or Tigase server development to launchpad.net however.

The purpose of the project created over there is to host prebuilt Ubuntu packages in a PPA (personal package archive).

A few weeks ago I announced that Gentoo ebuilds are available. I have also received information about RPM packages being maintained by someone. That would be the third packaging system for the Tigase server I know of. This makes live easier for all those who want to install Tigase server on different Linux distributions.

While I can not maintain packages for all systems myself I am always happy to help and assist those who decide to take this responsibility. If anybody is interested in helping with those please contact me. The Gentoo Linux ebuilds will be hosted in the main Tigase server SVN repository. Ubuntu packages on launchpad.net, I am not sure where RPM packages will be available but there is always a lot of space in our SVN.

The whole Tigase server development is oriented around automatic tests we run using Tigase Test Suite. Our aim is to not release new stuff before it is tested using automated tests. Only this way we can be sure all the server features work the same way for every release. The drawback is that we first need to create tests, then we can run them to test the server. It is a bit like double development effort.

The suite evolves together with the server. At the beginning I was running only functional tests executing test cases sequentially. Then I added performance tests which required running many tests concurrently on a separate connections and stability tests which in turn required lower resources consumption and..... stability. Every new addition required slightly new features set.

A few months back when I was running load tests that was another challenge to run the test suite from multiple machines and again I had to lower resources consumption to be able to open more than 60k user connections from each test suite instance.

We extensively use Bosh in a few Tigase installations so to provide decent support for web clients I have added Bosh tests which required a different way to maintain connections to the server because the Bosh client can send each request on a separate TCP/IP connection.

Now the clustering in Tigase. We have working clustering mode in the server for a few months already but we decided not to release a new version before it is well tested using automatic tests. New challenge - open multiple connections from the test suite and each connection must end up on a different cluster node.

Today I am happy to announce all the cluster tests have passed. This is a big step for us in our preparation for publishing Tigase 4.0. Now we can focus on those countless tiny bits required to prepare binary packages for the new version.

Below is a copy of the clustering tests report, for those who are interested in more details.

Tigase.org website, e-mail, SVN, XMPP and all other services have been successfully migrated to a new server at the external service provider.

Let me know if you find any problems with the website or any other services.

I hope this solves for good problems with availability and accessibility to the Tigase.org services.

I am back from holiday and all Tigase services are back too.

It's been a long holiday, maybe too long but very enjoyable and interesting. Part of the trip was participation in the XMPP Summit in Portland.

Unfortunately during the trip our main server which has been working fine for last 6 months has stopped accepting network connections for unknown reason. There is no apparent trace in log files so I am uncertain whether this is a hardware problem or misconfiguration. After kicking the power button restarting the machine everything came back to normal.

To avoid such a problem in the future I am now in process of moving all Tigase services to the external service provider - Flosoft.biz on to dedicated Eco08 XXL machine. This should solve for good problem with the hardware as well as with accessing the machine while I am away.

Flosoft offers Jabber services based on Tigase server. There is a huge number of options and you can have own Jabber domain with any number accounts depending on your needs.

On the occasion of the new website launch Flosoft runs a special promotion and you can get 100% off for the first 3 months of service on 2 products: Jabber Domain Lite or Jabber Domain Power. No contract binding, after 3 months period you can either continue or cancel the contract.

The promotion is valid until: 21/07/2008 that is XMPP Summit. All you need to do is to enter a coupon code: tigase4everyone while placing an order online.

The full cluster mode implementation for Tigase server is almost done. At the moment most of our effort is put to testing and debugging.

We are looking for anybody keen to spare a few minutes to help us with real world tests. If you can, please go to xmpp-test.tigase.org website for all the details: register an account, connect with your client, play a while and let us know if you notice anything worth mentioning.

Recent Minichat addition on the Tigase website raised lots of questions about access to the source code.

Following those requests we have listed all the projects Tigase team works on and all the source codes are now publicly available. You can go to the projects page and browse all the published projects.

Please note, most of the project trackers are in initial state and the web content might be missing. You can, however access the project source codes, bug tracking system and see the roadmap. We are working hard on adding missing elements.

Your comments as always are very welcomed.

Thanks to Directi Company who offered their hardware for Tigase tests I had a unique opportunity to do more detailed load tests under the Java profiler control. Good environment teamed with a good tools allowed me to find places where some optimizations are possible and further improve the Tigase server.

In my last tests, even though, the Tigase server was running under the Java profiler which consumes extra memory and CPU power I was able to achieve 152 584 concurrent, active connections.

In this test the client side software was the main limitation. I had only 3 machines to generate client traffic. In theory it allows to create maximum 3 x 64k connections. In practice it is slightly less. On top of this the client generators use more resources than the Tigase server as they are significantly less optimized.

As in previous test the hardware used to run Tigase server was: Pentium(R) D CPU 3.00GHz Dual Core, 4GB RAM, 144GB SATA HDD running on 64bit CentOS 5.1, Sun HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 1.6.0_03-b05, mixed mode).

Here are statistics taken at the end of the test:

The rest of the test parameters and all conditions stay the same.

I had an opportunity to use 4 server like machines to do some load tests over the Tigase server. The Tigase server was installed on one of the boxes and the 3 others generated client connections and the traffic. As the subject says I achieved 109 707 authenticated connections before client software ran out of memory and the test finished.

Here are some statistics taken at the end of the test:

Environment configuration - Pentium(R) D CPU 3.00GHz Dual Core, 4(server)2(clients)GB RAM, 144GB SATA HDD, 64bit CentOS 5.1, Sun HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 1.6.0_03-b05, mixed mode).

Tigase Test Suite was used for generating user connections and the traffic.

For more comments on these results please continue reading...

If you can see this message it means that DNS change has been populated and you access Tigase service on the new server.

The old machine was quite underpowered and couldn't cope with the traffic and all services running on tigase.org. The new server with Core2Quad CPU, 4GB RAM and 500GB HDD in RAID1 mirror should be enough for our needs.

If you see something not working correctly or some unexpected behavior please let me know.

The old machine is still alive with all services working on it so some people may still connect to the old server while some other for who DNS changes was updated earlier may connect to the new server. I am going to shutdown the old machine within a few days.

The first day of FOSDEM 2008 is over.

This year Jabber/XMPP presence was very insignificant on the conference. Just both, not room, no talks or presentations. There was however a Jabber/XMPP booth. I met a few new people from the Jabber/XMPP community over there and I ad a few nice chats with them.

Quite a few people were stopping at our booth, asking for things and chatting with Jabber gurus. My impression is that interest in Jabber was bigger this year than it was last year. Well, at least at the Jabber booth. We didn't have a room and presentations these year and most of the hot chats and discussions took place near the Jabber room last year. So maybe this is why more people were discussing stuff near the booth.

Florian showed a very cool and cute little machine assembled on a little motherboard. According to the spec this stuff takes much less power than an average laptop. Imagine a farm of such tiny devices running Jabber/XMPP cluster.
Hm, my wife wouldn't call it cute, but women have a different sense of "cutnes".

I have also seen blogging from a mobile device in action presented by Fabio and actually it was just blogging from a Jabber/XMPP client in action. It happen to be a mobile Jabber/XMPP client with enough capabilities to support ad-hoc commands. Very similar idea to my StanzaReceiver but in my case I haven't used ad-hoc commands. Just pure messages. Have a look at the right column on the Tigase website - "Minis from XMPP" are posts from my Jabber/XMPP client. This is good, XMPP is so flexible that you can achieve similar goals in different ways to better support end-user needs.

Tigase website and the service disappeared for over 2 weeks.

I am sorry for all the inconvenience and problems it could caused and for a disruption of the XMPP/Jabber service. We have now a business class Internet connection with 24/7 support and I believe it won't happen again.

Please let me know if you notice something wrong with the website or the service. Internet provider has changed and our network configuration has changed too, so there might be still some outstanding issues to solve.

We had a problem with our Internet connection provider who accidentally disconnected our wire during the maintenance.
It took them over 2 weeks to fix the problem and in the meantime after calling the technical service every day hearing the same: "Might be fixed tomorrow or in a few days but I can not guarantee it won't take a month." I decided to change the Internet provider.

You can read the full story on my blog website.

I am thinking again of outsourcing the server hosting....

From now all Tigase code is available under GPLv3 license.

To avoid confusion the version of the code has been also changed. All releases with version number below 3.0.0 are licensed under GPLv2 and the versions 3.0.0 and later are licensed under GPLv3.

If you need more information about motives behind this move I can't explain it better than rms did in his Why Upgrade to GPLv3 article.

It was a great day. I met a lot of people from Jabber community and was able to talk to them personally. It is always nice to see people who you know only from the Internet.

Really impressive Peter's speech. I have a lot to learn from him. All other presentations were very interesting too, showing different areas of Jabber use.