Maximum simultaneous connections

Hey folks,

Long time no talkie I know. I've been a little preoccupied with my Raspberry Pi ;D but I digress.

I'm in the process of setting up a PirateBox for an outdoor dance party info tent and the organisers are wondering how many simultaneous connections there can there be? I'm running PirateBox on a TP-Link MR3220. Does anyone have any experience with this device? They're primarily gonna be serving up pdfs and images for site information, set times, band information etc. I will be disabling uploads so that should free up some bandwidth(?).

Many thanks and much peace,
Dr Hitchcock

Bandwidth is an issue, but only if everyone is downloading at once. I am honestly more worried about how the dhcp server will handle itself, how many people are we talking?

Going by the amount of activity I've seen around the info tent in the past I'd say maybe between 20-30 connected at a time tops.

I'm also thinking of setting up a php forum running on a raspberry pi that's connected to the piratebox via ethernet.

After chatting with a friend he suggested that reducing the lease time on DHCP to 1 minute might solve overload problems? Does this sound right?

"The pudding's probe is eating" or something similar, right?
I didn't have the chance to test something like this, but I would be really interested to find out (and I think generally the forum )so please send a feedback with your findings.
I personally would think that you could connect 20-30 people at the same time, however as TerrorByte said, download speeds would drop if there are multiple download requests.

DHCP to 1 minute hmm...wouldn't that mean that the router has to re-address everybody again after the 1 minute? (If I think this right...my home router also has a fixed time for DHCP lease, but I stay connected afterwards as well, hence I get a new address. So say you have 20ppl connected and a 1 min DHCP lease, to me it seems like your router will just do more work by addressing everybody?)

According to my friend the DHCP lease stays current while the connection is active. So from what I understand it isn't reassigning currently connected devices. This is not an area I'm super familar with so if my thinking is wrong please let me know.

no, no, no and no

I configured a long lease time, so reassigning a already given IP adress. This is no issue at all.
I sign of overload is that the dhcp is not answering in needed time.. but this only happens on high cpu load. But this mostly depends on the client: my linux notebook does severall retries untill it creates a APIPA-Dummy IP, my android does not retry at all and I have to do it manually.

The most problematic part is the USB drive!!!!!!!!
If you buy USB drives with low bandwith in reading & writing speeds, this drops the performance alot!!! I encoutered this problem with a very tiny one and switch to a Kingston series one.
The most problematic part is the USB drive!

The counted connected clients are not the problem, it is load through up- and download.


Matthias

Thanks for clearing that up Matthias. I'm gonna try some connection stress testing this afternoon. I'll be sure to post results here.

That makes sense actually, I didn't realize they had a long dhcp lease time.

What are the most users that anyone has had connected at one time?

While waiting to enter the US at JFK airport I had 60+ connections at the same time at one point and 200+ connections during the total waiting time of three hours it took me to get past customs.

I can tell you, this is a good way to distract yourself while in line... :-)

But posting to the chatbox at that point was very difficult. You had to wait 40-50sec. for your post to show up. Many people didn't get that and kept on clicking 'submit' resulting in many empty posts... :-(

The max I had for a longer time and what worked fine was 7-8 people.

Thanks for the feedback!

The point is like you described, it was getting even more worse if more people click on sending. The processes lines up after each other.
The reading of the box already works with an statically written file, that should reduce the load while reading. ..

I think we should add some text to the shoutbox... like "posting text....." and then make the writing box+submit free again.

I added it to our feature list: [github.com]

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