Freifunk München Builds A Public Jitsi Server Cluster

Screenshot of the FFM Jitisi Grafana FrontendOn Tuesday this week, awlnx and Krombel of Freifunk München (FFMUC) gave a virtual presentation online about their public Jitsi Server cluster installation and how they have set up the system. Currently, it serves well over 400 simultaneous participants in the evenings in 70 concurrent rooms. And with their 20 video bridge servers they say that they are prepared for over a thousand simultaneous users!

In their 30 minute talk (in German), they give an overview of how they have set up their Jitisi cluster with a front end server that communicates with 20 Jitsi bridge VMs to handle the overall load. If you are interested in the topic but don’t speak German, the slides they show in the video are still insightful even without the German commentary, and further information is available on this Wiki page in English.

Apart from feeling reassured that Jitsi can be scaled if required for my purposes, the other interesting piece of information I got out of the session is that Firefox is currently not working well at all with Jitsi. FFMUC has even gone so far as to block access to their system when Firefox is detected. They say this has become necessary as Firefox not only gives a bad experience to one person but also has significant negative consequences for all other people on a bridge, as videos are not shown and are not rate limited.

And last but not least they’ve set up a Grafana front-end to monitor their system. See this link and the screenshot above. Busy hour at 8 pm is clearly visible 🙂

Thanks so much to awlnx and Krombel for sharing this, and of course, for offering the service to the public!