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Comment by deepersprout | Hacker News Reader

Does someone have experience running Jitsi with 4+ users? Like in conferences with maybe up to 12 people? Can it handle it?

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We regularly run it with 40-50 users, and it's fine... as long as you limit the number of displayed video streams to 12-15 or fewer. This tends to happen organically with people muting video, or otherwise you can configure Jitsi to limit it to show video for the last 12 people who spoke.

Otherwise you risk overloading people on devices which can't render >12 simultaneous video streams without melting. You can push the limit higher if you know everyone is on a fast machine however.

One thing worth noting is that if a one or more user connects via Firefox then quality degrades for everyone - but fixes for this look to be in flight over at https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/issues/4758

What server resources to you need for those 40-50 users with Jitsi/Matrix? I haven't seen estimates of required resources when I've looked, but I assume there's some doc somewhere. (Thanks for the good work.)

Roughly speaking we're seeing Jitsi serve around 1000 concurrent streams (i.e. 25x 50-user conferences) on a typical 4 core box with 8GB of RAM. However, it's worth noting that Jitsi is pretty low resource - all it's doing is forwarding streams of data around the place. All the heavy lifting is done by the clients when displaying all the concurrent videos, so it's the clients which tend to be the bottleneck.

> you can configure Jitsi to limit it to show video for the last 12 people who spoke

Can you please point me to where this can be done.

I run this at the house with 10mbits upload connection. have had 6 users, it was fine.

Jitsi uses about 5.5Mbps per connected Chrome user. This math doesn't line up, but if Jitsi isn't transporting the 720p video 10Mbps might work for 6 users.

1:1 video uses P2P and doesn't require video going through the Jitsi bridge.

Tbf, the bitrate depends entirely on the res constraints you've specified. We see 1Mbps when requesting 854x480, which seems to be quite a reasonable resolution when on a multiway conference.

Good to know!

Is this configurable on the client-side via configOverwrite.constraints when using the external API?

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