Expanding meet.vpsfree.cz with two new servers

There is a lot of interest in meet.vpsfree.cz, which makes us very happy. But it also means plenty of work for us. Here is the latest from the front line.

We have added two new physical servers to meet.vpsfree.cz, giving us 24 more CPU cores. Honza Panoch lent them to us and brought them right to our datacenter. Thank you! If you need hardware in a hurry, Honza is the person to ask.

We also split the server into two videobridge instances, because one large instance does not scale very well.

We updated Prosody to version 0.11, so mod_muc_allowners now works: everyone can remove anyone from a room. That is especially useful for ghosts, meaning disconnected clients.

Three videobridges run on TCP port 443, while one has TCP disabled entirely. I hope that works well. The reason is that nginx already occupies port 443 on meet.vpsfree.cz, and many people cannot reach the alternative port 4443. I hope this improves access from behind layers of firewalls and NATs. Please report problems to podpora@vpsfree.cz.

We still have three more servers from Honza Panoch in reserve, totaling at least another 24 cores. The day before yesterday, we ordered another two 20-core servers, which should be in the datacenter on Monday.

After that, Martin Milata and I plan to redeploy everything across all this hardware using NixOS. That will make management much more scalable, and I will be able to sleep peacefully, perhaps even at night...

Our estimated capacity is now about 1000 people calling simultaneously. Next week, we will probably double that, finally reaching the limit of our upgraded links.

If anything misbehaves for more than a few hours, please let us know. The operational graphs are public. See if you can stare at them longer than I can.