I need a jabber server that can handle a very large number of people and runs on linux.

Question

Me and a partner are building a social network, one of the key components is a chat system. We'd like to use jabber. I'm totally lost when it comes to xmpp. I'm trying to find a server that is fast and can handle a very large number of users, very very large in fact. Can someone please point me in the right direction as to want servers can help me with this task?

My server runs Ubuntu 10.4. I'd prefer something that is not java based. If java was a person I'd roll him/her up in a carpet and throw him/her off a bridge.

Answer 1

ejabberd, written in erlang.

Or, jabberd, written in C++, or jabberd2, a ground-up rewrite of jabberd.

Answer 2

A single server will never be "big" enough, but ejabberd has some nice clustering capabilities.

Answer 3

It depends on how many "very very large" really is. The difference between ten thousand concurrent users and a hundred thousand (or more) matters a lot. The other components you need to integrate are important, too, like a specific database or LDAP directory, and where they live.

Jabber XCP from Cisco can handle very large numbers of users. A few years ago it could handle LOTS of concurrent users on a single machine, along with hosting the database backend on the same box. It has built-in clustering components, too.

I've heard good things about ejabberd, but not seen specific numbers on it. The jabber.org server used to run on ejabberd, and ran jabberd before that. It now runs on M-link, which I hadn't heard of before just now. Since jabber.org "used to" run on those other platforms, you'll want to figure out why they changed before you pick them for your service.