Challenge
A leading telecommunications company in the Middle East sought to deploy an XMPP server cluster capable of supporting a large-scale user base. The goal was to ensure that the server could handle hundreds of thousands of concurrent users while maintaining optimal performance and reliability.
Solution
Our team collaborated within a larger distributed team to deliver a comprehensive solution that significantly enhanced system efficiency. Our primary responsibilities included creating an automated deployment and performance testing environment using Ansible on Oracle Cloud, conducting performance tests with Ansible and Erlang AMOC, and improving the XMPP server implementation and PostgreSQL schema. We successfully simulated hundreds of thousands of users, identified and removed bottlenecks in key custom features, and established a robust Oracle Cloud infrastructure for large-scale user messaging scenarios. The fully automated and deterministic performance tests allowed for straightforward comparisons between server versions. We integrated the XMPP server with Grafana, developing a specialized dashboard for monitoring the performance of various subsystems, including XMPP, ErlangVM, and RDBMS. Through extensive testing and monitoring, we investigated performance issues and implemented several optimizations in the XMPP server, refined database indexes, and recommended changes to mobile app communication with the XMPP server.
Results
Our efforts culminated in a robust, scalable XMPP server cluster capable of supporting hundreds of thousands of concurrent users. The automated performance testing environment and advanced monitoring tools provided invaluable insights, enabling continuous performance enhancements. These improvements ensured the system consistently met the high demands of one of the largest telcos in the Middle East.