Large-scale subsonic application

[spookybathtub]

Hello. I've been using Subsonic personally for a long time, and I'm looking into purchasing a license to use at my university's radio station, which I manage, but I need to work out a few kinks first. I have some questions that are really intended for the developers (Sindre), but I thought posting here might get some other useful responses too.

Some backstory: We have an enormous library of CD's (~2000 and growing) accumulated over years of record labels and indie artists sending promos, which is always available for student DJ's to listen and play on air. But it's hard to find anything and the collection takes up a lot of space, so the goal is to make it available online for DJ's. It would have to be password-restricted to only DJ's, so we stay within our copyright fair use.

1. How many users can subsonic handle? We would probably have around 100 to start, and that might grow to as much as 1000 over time. Will this cause any kind of strain or instability? Would the speed of the computer be a factor here? It will be running on a reasonably powerful Mac Pro.

2. How many songs/albums/gigabytes can subsonic handle?

3. How well does LDAP authentication work in subsonic? Our university uses some kind of Windows server, so all users would have an account there already. I think it would be efficient to use that, and avoid recreating dozens of user accounts myself, but I'm very unfamiliar with LDAP, so I don't know how to set it up. Would the university's network ops people have to enable something on their end? Also, there are thousands of students on campus, but subsonic access should be restricted to only the radio DJ's. How can I do that?

4. Do you expect to ever add support for user groups? I need to apply the same privileges to all DJ's, but different privileges for staff. Would it be possible to assign all LDAP users to one subsonic user account with the same settings, then create a few staff accounts separately?

Thanks.

[GJ51]

It's all a matter of resources. There are many variables that come into play, but if you have enough CPU power, ram, disk space, and bandwidth you should be able to handle very large demands.

I have 4775 Albums in my library and just 20 GB short of 3TB worth of data including video. But with dual quad core CPU's, 16GB ram, and a 35/35 FIOS connection; I haven't gotten close to finding the limits of what Subsonic can handle.

The biggest consideration will be upload bandwidth. If you transmit at 128kbps and have 1000 users you'll need 128,000kbps going out which is 125 Mbps. That's pretty stout. I have about 30 Mbps upload speed at max, so if I want some margin figure 25 Mbps, which if I transmit at 128kbps, 200 users would have me about at max.

[spookybathtub]

That's good to know, thanks. I expect more than half our traffic will be over LAN, and my server has an Internet2 connection with 100Mbps up/down so I think we'll be good in that regard.
Do you ever notice how much of your 16GB ram subsonic is using? I have 8GB, but this server has other duties as well.

[GJ51]

I don't think that will be a problem. The major issue with memory on large colections is allocating enough for the java memory limit. For large collections, 256 MB is usually enough, but if you start seeing problems you may need to bump it up to 512. The default is 100. I think it would be safe to assume that you shouldn't approach 1 GB, but I've never seen SS running with that many users. I have read posts from others who have claimed to have that many registered users, but I don't think they were all connected at the same time.

i certainly would love to hear how you make out with a project of this scale.

I did forget to comment on LDAP. the feedback I have seen is not favorable as yet. I can't be certain if what I've read indicates a problem with SS or a lack of knowledge on the part of the poster. I don't think there's any definitive information yet that clearly indicates how practical this would be in your environment.

[ytechie]

Keep in mind that multiple people can log into a single user on Subsonic. While this is not the most secure way to manage your server, it is one way to assign different permissions to multiple sets of users.

[lovebags]

We have been running Subsonic in a tertiary environment for the last few years using LDAP with no major issues with logins. Although we have a potential user base of around 60,000 it's used by mostly music students for educational purposes rather than a generic listening portal (in keeping with our licensing restrictions). As a result, the most I've ever seen logged in at any one time was about 40 with total number of users over time at around 500. Initially set-up on a MacPro with 6GB RAM, we had big problems with memory leakage and the server would need to be restarted every few days after heavy usage to clear the free memory. We have since switched to a Windows 2008 VM with 2GB RAM and have yet to experience any memory issues as yet. However we are still in the process of load testing to see how many much load the server can handle at once. Some more info about our set-up here...http://copyblog.e.unimelb.edu.au/?p=468

[ytechie]

This is the second or third time I've seen subsonic used in education. That's awesome!

[sir2u]

Regarding LDAP, Subsonic shouldn't have any issue authenticating against Active Directory or whatever LDAP server you use. I've got it using LDAPS to authenticate against a 2008R2 AD with no issues. You can use filters to restrict access per OU or group.

http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/CROWD/Restricting+LDAP+Scope+for+User+and+Group+Search has good info on the filter syntax.

[GJ51]

Thanks for the post and the link. We have a user that is looking for way of logging all the login attempts made.

viewtopic.php?f=2&t=9387

Any ideas?

Thanks

I've played with this a few times, but never got it working. Can you give me any good guides/tutorial for setting this up?

I'm all Windows running Active Directory on Server 08. What settings do I need in Server 08 and what edits do I need in Subsonic to get this working?

Thanks for any help you can offer.

Gary

[sir2u]

I've made a post on setting up LDAP on another thread: http://forum.subsonic.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=9286

For login audits, by enabling LDAP authentication, you do get the login audits in the subsonic.log file. I want to note that this will apply ONLY to users WITHOUT local accounts. There is no audit trail if the user does not authenticate against LDAP. I'm running subsonic in Tomcat on Linux. I don't know where the log files are for any of the other installation types.

Here are what the log entries look like:

Failed login, unknown user
[2012-04-25 15:44:14,130] INFO SubsonicLdapBindAuthenticator - Failed to authenticate user 'sdf' in LDAP.
org.acegisecurity.userdetails.UsernameNotFoundException: User sdf not found in directory.

Successful login
[2012-04-25 15:45:33,631] INFO SubsonicLdapBindAuthenticator - User 'sam' successfully authenticated in LDAP. DN: CN=Sam,ou=users,dc=domain,dc=local

Failed login, wrong password
[2012-04-25 15:47:33,965] INFO SubsonicLdapBindAuthenticator - Failed to authenticate user 'sam' in LDAP.
org.acegisecurity.BadCredentialsException: Bad credentials

[spookybathtub]

That's excellent, just what I was hoping for. Thanks.

[GJ51]

Thanks Sir2u! I'm gonna give it a try.