[CalendarServer-users] DCS Production Deployment

[rhodey]

I've been running DCS in production for the past ~year, at the moment my
deployment supports ~800 users. It took *a lot* of reading through doc
and code to feel even remotely comfortable with storing real data for
real people and I still don't feel all that great about it.

Please, allow me to ramble for a minute, take from it what you will...

1. IMO the idea of XMLDirectoryService is seriously dated and kinda
crazy so I wrote my own postgresql backed DirectoryService with support
for memcached. This SQL-backed DirectoryService is much easier to manage
(because SQL) and allows me to have other services work off of the same
account database. Speaking of memcached, DCS (as far as I can tell)
caches very little and could stand to benefit from using it more often.

2. DCS uses the python twisted framework but at the same time it
doesn't-- calls to DirectoryService (regardless of the implementation)
are blocking 0.o

3. DCS has this weird multi-process, master-slave concept where multiple
DCS instances run on the same box-- I just think this is weird and
dealing with dead processes has been strange.

4. If a user uploads a contact containing a photo and you're using a
database for storage (as you should), DCS will store that photo in your
database-- yuck! Even with your 1000 users, each with maybe 100 contact
photos, things get kinda bloated. So, I modified DCS to strip contact
photos from contacts and store them in Amazon S3, then piece them back
together on demand.

5. Someone could DOS my DCS instances via network resource exhaustion
very easily and there is very little that I could do to stop it other
than launch a crazy number of EC2 instances and burn through money. DCS
is not efficient (blocking calls to DirectoryService, etc) and I feel
very uncomfortable having any less than than two m3.medium instances
running at all times (costly!).

All that being said, DCS is still the best free and open source option
out there but I wish I had written my own WebDAV server from scratch
using 'dropwizard' instead. The world of high availability services
changes so rapidly and many of the ideas in this project are dated--
like, even table joins really shouldn't exist anymore.

-- rhodey orbits

On 02/18/2015 01:04 PM, Gaurav Jain wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Thank you very much for CalendarServer
> 
> I have few questions:
> 
> * I used CalendarServer-5.2.2 during development phase.
> * Now I want to use it for some real (users) use cases.
> * Right now, I do not have any scaling issues.
> * I run it on Ubuntu EC2 instance.
> 
> My question is:
> 
> * Has CalendarSever-5.2.2 been used in PROD deployments?
> * Since I don't have scaling issues, is it ok to use XMLDirectoryService
> for like 1000 accounts?
> 
> Any tip would be useful for PROD deployments. Even for 1000 users, we would
> like it not to go down at all.
> 
> 
> Best Regards,
> Gaurav Jain
> 
> 
> 
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