PDF Server YAFPC-Appliance Forum

After fixing a bug that caused a system crash when accessed by a large number of users, I have tested the system with a "traffic simulator" script. The test machine (appliance) was installed as virtual machine on VMware ESX Server 3.0.2. The VM has 512MB RAM, a 1GB HDD and is running from CD image version 5.03 with VMware-tools plugin installed and 6 testprinters configured.

The "traffic simulator" script was running on a Linux machine in the network. The script was running an endless loop doing the following steps:
- chose a random user account (1 of 500 possible)
- chose a random printer (1 of 6 possible)
- send a print job of 5 pages test document
- wait for a random time (1 to 20 seconds)

6 instances of this script were running in parallel for about 48 hours having printed 49810 documents. 2980 documents (6%) were discarded for exceeding the "maximum number of jobs" in a printer queue. 46830 documents were created properly and stored to the home directories of the 500 users. Documents in user homes have been removed when older than 30 minutes. Sending email to users was disabled.

After stopping the sripts there were 1398 print jobs remaining in the queues of the 6 printers. It took nearly 2 hours until the remaining jobs were printed and all queues were empty.

Looks like the system is bulletproof now!
It would be interesting to know, who has the system running with the biggest load in a production environment. Please report here.

W.U.