[hybrid] about hub setup

[Tom Rons]

Ismail,

First off, IRC is a tree-style network, meaning each server has only one uplink to "the network". A distinction is made between leaf servers (one connection to another server) and one or more hub servers (these are the servers that the leaf servers connect to, to form a network). If you want to link 3 servers, you will have to configure one of them as hub, so this will be the server that the other two leaf servers connect to.

Keep in mind that the structure of an IRC network is inherently unstable, if a server link goes down your network will fall apart with a lot of burst traffic to resynchronize it when the servers reconnect. This consumes bandwidth and of course it's very annoying for your users, and it can't be avoided unless you stick to a single server.

Second, the user load. Have you investigated the practical limits of the IRC daemon? Probably not. Do you have a practical need to run 3 separate servers, or is it merely a pipedream? Load balancing has a ring to it, it sounds like a magical scalability fix, but that doesn't always make it so. In the case of IRC, the best scalability fix is sticking to a single powerful server and avoiding multiple servers all together if you can. It's when you start linking servers that it starts falling apart. ;) Here's an interesting quote from Mr. Jon Lusky from last year, in response to another user who also thought to optimize their set-up by load-balancing multiple servers:

"Back in the day, a pentium 2-400 running freebsd and hydrid-5.x could handle about 75,000 users on a single server.  I don't have any current perf data, but a current version of hybrid on a modern processor running linux 2.6.x should handle a lot more than 75,000 clients."

Something to think about.

Best regards,

Tom Rons


On 16 Apr 2011, at 11:36, İsmail DOĞAN wrote:

> Hello everybody,
> 
> I need learn something about hub setup. I want setup ircd-hybrid on 3 different physical servers. I want to set hub configuration. My goal is sharing users to servers. How can I do something like that? If firstly I have to read some documents before write to list, please help; which one?
> 
> I don't sure "this is a correct question for this list." If I'm doing mistake, sorry.
> 
> regards