Old Legacy Server Sizing

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Since September 2020, the old Server Specification Calculator has been deprecated. Our new server sizing calculator will be posted soon.

This article is out of date.

Contents

Flows and Server Sizing

GigaFlow has been tested and certified to support up to 1,000 concurrent devices or up to 40,000 flows per second (flow/s) from less than 20 devices.

The flow rate changes with the number of connected devices as follows:

Flows/s	Devices
50,000	10
40,000	20
20,000	40
10,000	80
5,000	160
2,500	300
1,250	600
1,000	1,000

Disk Throughput for Flow Writing to Database

Allow for at least 600 bytes per flow record per second for I/O throughput, i.e.

Flow/s Bytes/s (Sustained Write Performance) MB/s (Sustained Write Performance)
100 60,000 0.06
2,000 1,200,000 1.20
10,000 6,000,000 6.00
40,000 24,000,000 24.00

Disk I/O for Flow Writing To Database

With f = flow/s d = number of devices I = Input/Output performance measurement (IOP), nominally sustained sequential writing.

I = 20 + (f / 500) + (d / 5)

i.e. allow for a base of 20 IOPs, add an additional 1 IOP/s for every 500 flow/s and another 1 IOP/s for every 5 devices.

Flow/s Number of Devices IOPs
1,000 1,000 222
5,000 1,000 230
10,000 100 60
40,000 10 102

Disk I/O for Flow Reading from Database

Allow for at least 100 IOPs read.

Disk Sizing

The server must support at least 300 MB/s sustained read and write to handle the peak device or flow count. Anything less than this will result in dropped flows. For Linux, we recommend EXT4 or XFS file systems as well a dedicated RAID partition for the database. Adding a hardware RAID controller that supports RAID 10, or at least RAID 5, will improve performance and provide hardware redundancy. The amount of storage required is directly related to the flow rate and features enabled.

Data Type Minimum Space per Record (Bytes)
Forensics Flow 250
Event Record 900

500 flow/s of forensics == 450 MB per hour == 11 GB disk space per day.

RAM Sizing

A basic installation should have 4 GB RAM available for the OS and additional 50 MB per device to monitor. More RAM will always improve performance:

Number of Devices Min RAM (GB)
10 4.5
100 9.0
500 29.0
1,000 54.0

CPU Sizing

CPU sizing in GigaFlow is based on the Postgre SQL database. Overall performance is also dependent on CPU performance.

While there is little to gain by going beyond 8 cores if you have more than 20 devices the load can be spread across additional cores, more powerful CPUs will provide a better experience. Intel's Xeon X5680 3GHz or Core i7-3770S 3GHz are recommended as a minimum required specification.

See here for a useful server size calculator.

See Manual FAQs for more, including sample calculations.