Old Legacy Server Sizing
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This article is out of date.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.