Hardware Requirements on Solaris SPARC 11

[Walter Forbes Hoehn (wassa)]

> On Mar 31, 2015, at 6:28 PM, Straubs, Christian (US - Arlington) <cstraubs at deloitte.com> wrote:
> Thanks for reaching out. We are hoping for hardware specs to use in a pitch for a sub system we are attempting to implement. Specifically: 
> 1. CPU usage
> 2. RAM 
> 3. Disk space 

On any modern hardware, disk and RAM consumption are modest.  One GB will hold the IdP and whatever servlet container you choose.  Depending on your retention policy, disk usage will be mostly dedicated to logs.  Even with in-memory storage, a few GBs of RAM dedicated to the JVM is more than enough.

In the tests I’ve run, throughput has been limited by CPU (because of the cryptographic operations) and latency has been determined primarily by the responsiveness of back-end infrastructure (LDAP/DBs).

> 1) How many SPs will the IdP service?
> 	The IdP will initially not use many SPs (1-2), but in time would scale to up to 20 SPs.   
> 2) How often will these be accessed?
> 	These will be very common SPs (Google, etc.). These would be used rather frequently.
> 3) What will be their typical session duration?
> 	I would imagine anywhere from 10-30 minutes due to the nature of the SPs that would integrate.

It all comes down to the maximum throughput you need to handle at an acceptable latency.

> I know this is still vague. I am looking more for some example deployments of Shibboleth to use as benchmarks for our deployment on Solaris. 

Marvin posted some IdP v3a load testing metrics a few months back (on CentOS):

 https://wiki.shibboleth.net/confluence/display/IDP30/Load+Testing+Contributed+Results

If it would be helpful to you, I’d be happy to add some of my own metrics to this page.  My testing was also done on CentOS, so these will only give you the most general idea of the sort of performance you can expect.

Just let me know.

-Walter