Freeradius Server Performance & Provisioning

[Tiago Ratto]

Hello there,

We are using Freeradius for about four years now, and it has proven a
robust and reliable AAA solution.
In our actual setup, we don't use Interim updates.
As our needs changed over time, it's now imminent for us to use the Interim
feature, so we've done some tests and statistics.
We have an average of 7K simultaneously connected users, of 15K in total.
Our growth is something about 150 users per month.

In our first test, we'd set our NASses to send updates with 1 minute
frequency, what resulted in about 100 update queries per second.
Our server didn't managed to handle that volume of activity, and when using
vmstat to measure the performance, we've noticed that our problem was
relative with interrupts per second and context switches, with both
parameters with levels in about 3000.
Since each query take about 0,016 seconds to execute, we need 1,6 seconds
to handle 1 second of activity.
Our current server configuration is a Quad core Xeon 3400, with 2GB RAM,
and a RAID 0 array of 2 disks running MySQL as database backend.

Later we had set our Interim update to 5 minutes, so we ended with an
average of 20 update queries per second, and interrupts per second and
context switches in about 800 with 1200 peaks.

I'm no DBA, so I've done as much tuning as I could learn from MySQL
documentations and users forums. But I feel that our database could be
tuned a little more. In addition, we're planning to upgrade the server.

So I ask you guys some advice on MySQL tuning and Server provisioning to do
the AAA of about 25000 users with the 5 minutes Interim.


Much Thanks
Tiago Ratto
ti at friistelecom.com.br
IT - Friis Telecom
http://www.friistelecom.com.br
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