Do you administer a huge corporation? Wonder if Openfire will be able to service all of your users, from the geeks in the fourth floor to the bosses in the penthouse? Fear not. Throughout the book I've been praising Openfire's ability to scale and accommodate thousands of users with the same ease and effortlessness with which it handles a handful. In this chapter, we put that claim to test. We'll learn to setup Openfire to handle thousands of users concurrently.
First and foremost, if you want so many users concurrently interacting through Openfire, you'll have to employ an external database. Openfire's in-built HSQLDB works, but several people on the Openfire forum suggest that HSQL should not be used in a production environment even with a small number of users. As we are talking about several thousand users exchanging data at the same time, it's best to use a database equipped to handle such extreme loads with ease. Openfire supports some of the best known...