Lagging, disruptions and unusable UX at 20+ users (config hints)

[Seehank]

Hey guys,

I have recently put my Jitsi server to a test. Meaning 20-25 people being there. Long story short I had to move the meeting to Zoom (sad).

Now I am running my Jitsi server on Ubuntu VM with:

4x 2.4Ghz VCPU
4GB RAM
1Gbit bandwidth

But from 15 people up terrible lags and spikes and audio/video interruptions started occurring so I had to move the meeting. However, I could not find any bottleneck in my configs.

Also in my Jitsi settings, I set maximum Video size to 576 to reduce bandwidth.

Do you have any hints? what the problem could be? How could I try solving it? Also is there any way to simulate the Jitsi server load?

Thanx for any good advice. It’s much appreciated.

S

[ronquilstr]

Hi,
Have you checked the load on the user side? The problem is not necessarily on the server.
Start to check CPU load on user side, and jitsi-videobridge logs on server side (/var/log/jitsi/jvb.log)

If some user were using Firefox, it might also explain (missing simulcast). See this issue

[gpatel-fr]

@Seehank

But from 15 people up

Take a look at this post

Basically at this number of participants, this is a no longer a ‘meeting’ but rather a conference, so it makes no sense to display a large number of thumbnails on the screen and it’s very resource intensive even for the workstations themselves.

[Seehank]

Really? I always thought it was alternative to Zoom or kind of “unlimited” number of participants meeting. Which it is, just demanding very high hardware requirements.

It makes sence to me, because it a discussion group, any ofthe 25 people can talk, so we do want to see each other. Or are you saying something else? Maybe I am not getting your point.

[Seehank]

Firefox recently had update and fix in Jitsi, I naturally upgraded it today. I will see if it changes anything.

S

[xranby]

You can make the user-interface work for 20+ users by reducing GUI re-layouts.

Use the
disableAudioLevels: true,
option to reduce CPU usage for slow clients. (this removes the blue “i am talking” dots)

Host a meeting with 500 people - ideas?

Client computer bottleneck Jitsi meet work out of the box with up to about 15 participants. After that you will start to run into bottlenecks for users with slow computers that the userinterface redraw itself too much and consume 100% cpu. This can be solved by profiling using the chrome performance monitor and disable all things that consume CPU time. For example audio level monitoring that render the blue dots when someone talk trigger GUI updates. With many users these GUI updates will cau…

I have also disabled the popup messages when someone enters the room:
/usr/share/jitsi-meet/interface_config.js
DISABLE_JOIN_LEAVE_NOTIFICATIONS: true,

Further i have disabled most extra indicators that cause GUI re-layouts thus recude CPU load on the client browsers
also set in the /usr/share/jitsi-meet/interface_config.js

SET_FILMSTRIP_ENABLED: false,
DISABLE_FOCUS_INDICATOR: true,
DISABLE_DOMINANT_SPEAKER_INDICATOR: true,

[xranby]

also set in the /usr/share/jitsi-meet/interface_config.js
DISABLE_VIDEO_BACKGROUND: true,

This disable the blurred video background outside of the video, it makes a huge improvement if you use jitsi meet on a low end client such as a raspberry pi.