Optimal setup to handle large tps

[Fajar A. Nugraha]

On Fri, Oct 26, 2012 at 4:51 PM, Marius Booysen
<marius.booysen at eircom.net> wrote:
> I have a requirement to deploy Freeradius to handle about 2M
> customers and of course I need to set up my environment
> optimally. I am aiming for about 1500 auths or accounting
> requests per second.
>
> 1.) Can Freeradius achieve that? Reading the performance
> blurb suggests it can?

Yes, but be very, very careful during design phase of your solution.
Get experts to help you if you can.

For example, 1500 auth or acct/sec for 2M users would probably
corressponds to ... what, 15-30 minutes accounting interim update
interval? While it's very tempting to have near-real-time-enough usage
update for users, the cost might be too great. You could probably
lower that to 1 - 3 hour interval, and still find it acceptable from
business-case perspective, while greaty reducing the burden on your
backend.

Another example. 1500 packets per sec would roughly means your backend
(e.g. db) should be able to handle that ammount of read/write
transaction combined, multiplied  by (roughly) anywhere from 2 - 10
times (depending on your exact config). Reads for FR are usually
"cheap" enough (courtesy of cache and index), but writes are
expensive. And even 3k write transaction / sec is no joke. If you use
a db backend, make sure you have a qualified dba and sysadmin to
design a suitable solution. Hint: if they offer something with only
4-10 disks in RAID 5/6 configuration for that amount of workload, it's
usually an early sign that they're not qualified to do the job.

-- 
Fajar