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Comment by nathan_long | Hacker News Reader

How many people can you have in a single meeting?

It’s up to WebRTC and TURN server. Can be any number in theory. The layouts support 100 people, but each participant would have 100 peer to peer connections.

Perhaps one advantage of Zoom is that it rebalances things onto servers it owns eg via websockets? Is there documentation on this?

Recently, I have come across the so-called signaling server which seems to be another part being used with Nextcloud Talk. For Nextclouds the default signaling server can handle just about 4 participants. So there seems to be a bit more to it than just WebRTC and TURN.

What exactly makes this limit?

I have no idea (maybe PHP). I just saw that they a short info text in the backend and display a warning when you are having a conversation with more than 4 participants. Couldn't find any documentation on what the underlying problem is.

> An external signaling server should optionally be used for larger installations. Leave empty to use the internal signaling server.

> Please note that calls with more than 4 participants without external signaling server, participants can experience connectivity issues and cause high load on participating devices.

Probably it's just the sheer amount of connections you have to make. But it's possible to have even 10 people. Especially if you go through a central hub.

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