Apple Push Notification Service server load?

Question

I'm preparing to set up a APNS message server, and I was wondering if anybody has done any analysis on APNS server load that they would be able to share. Minimum server specs, maximum messages per second, anything like that.

Thanks!

edit: I'm planning to implement this with .NET, but info about any platform would be incredibly useful.

Answer 1

There are no maximum messages per second.

Answer 2

For my application (which has about 24,000 downloads) I am seeing an average of of about 1300 messages sent a day.

Those are low numbers, but then my client base isn't that large either. But I figure I might as well contribute some info. :-)

My notification provider is idle most of the time so there is MUCH more capacity available if I need it.

Its also using very little ram at this point (somewhere around 13 mb - I implemented my provider in Python and suspect most of that is taken up by the run time).

I am running on a Media Temple dv (specifically the Base configuration).

I haven't extrapolated out the numbers to find what my theoretical maximum would be, but because of the niche market of my application its not something that worries me at this point. I have lots of capacity to scale with.

Hope that helps a bit.

chris.

Answer 3

One of the Apple devs mentioned that 100,000 messages is not considered a large amount, that doesn't really answer your question, but I wouldn't expect that sending the actual messages would be the bottleneck. Any server that can handle your database work should be fine for sending the messages out. The protocol is intentionally light-weight.

Answer 4

You should consider that every message must be smaller than 256 Byte. Otherwise Apple will be reject your messages. And you can also check MonoPush. AFAIK they are building their products top of the .Net Framework.