FreeRadius msg processing rate

[Peter Nixon]

On Wed 04 Feb 2009, Sourav Chakraborty wrote:
> The machine on which FreeRadius is running had Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU
> 2.40GHz.It had MySQL server version: 5.0.18 installed on it(without
> clustering).
>
> How will the number of reads/writes per second vary if I use a highend
> machine for hosting the MySQL DB?Is there any performance metrics for the
> same?

Hi Sourav

I believe I have already answered your question a while ago, but let me do so 
again.

When using an SQL backend with FreeRADIUS, the SQL backend is almost ALWAYS 
the bottleneck. FreeRADIUS itself scales very well on its own. This means 
that you will need to learn a lot more about SQL if you don't already know 
it. For the type of loads you say you have you will need..

* At least a dedicated DB server (preferably a cluster). You need to talk to 
professionals who understand the DB you are planning to deploy (I prefer 
Postgresql but it appears you have already decided on MySQL) to talk about 
scaling to 3000+ writes per second. This will most likely mean a Quad-CPU 
machine with 5+ SAS disks in a RAID5 (or 6 or 10) array setup.

* Probably a secondary FreeRADIUS server also in case of failure of the 
original.

This is no different to any other scaling issue with databases. Talk to a 
database professional. FreeRADIUS has very simple DB needs. For each 
accounting packet it does at least one write and possibly several ready 
(depending on config) and for each Auth packet it may do up to 4 or 5 reads 
(and possibly a couple of writes) depending on your FreeRADIUS config.

This means that your DB infrastructure needs to be VERY solid...

Regards
-- 

Peter Nixon
http://peternixon.net/