Hardware requirements

Based on our initial single machine setups, we can indicate some minimum system requirements to reach a certain performance.

A Kubernetes setup will scale more easy while being a little more expensive.

Determine what you need

Municipalities

For municipality users, we made a small table of to quickly look up how many users we expect to access the system concurrently based on the number of inhabitants. You can also directly look at the concurrent users in the performance table below if this is not applicable or you have a good idea of the number of concurrent users yourself.

Inhabitants

Expected concurrent users

10.000

100

50.000

250

100.000

500

500.000

1.000

1.000.000

2.000

Performance

We made a translation to technical performance requirements (requests per second). We used the following numbers to make the translation:

  1. Average number of requests per functional scenario: 7 (higher means more requests per second)

  2. Average waiting time between functional scenario’s: 1 minute (lower means more requests per second)

Concurrent users

Expected requests per second

100

15

250

30

500

60

1.000

120

2.000

235

The above number for requests per second depends greatly on the the actual usage of the API. We used theoretical scenarios to give some indication, so it’s best to use a higher number when looking for the minimum system requirements below.

Minimum system requirements

  • Platform: 64-bit

  • Processor(s): 4 - 16 CPUs (see below) at 2.0 GHz

  • RAM: 8 - 32 GB (see below)

  • Hard disk space: 20 GB (excluding storage for documents)

Based on the number of requests per second you need, you can see what kind of hardware you need to achieve this.

Requests per second

CPUs

Memory (GB)

25

4

8

50

6

12

100

12

24

150

14

28

200

16

32

With these specifications you can run everything on a single machine or divided over several instances.

Postgresql database minimum requirements

The performance of the Open Object API under load is very much dependant on the performance of the Postgresql database. The number of requests per second and the total number of objects may affect the duration of the API calls. In order to avoid performance issues in production and aid in resolving performance issues we recommend to optimize the resources available and fine-tune the Postgresql with the help of pgbench. This built-in Postgresql tool gives an indication of the performance of the database setup.

An example run using pgbench:

pgbench (15.14 (Debian 15.14-0+deb12u1))
scaling factor: 1
query mode: simple
number of clients: 16
number of threads: 4
maximum number of tries: 1
duration: 60 s
number of transactions actually processed: 65995
number of failed transactions: 0 (0.000%)
latency average = 14.543 ms
latency stddev = 10.885 ms
initial connection time = 23.771 ms
tps = 1099.724563 (without initial connection time)

Using the default settings of pgbench, the following minimum tps is necessary for production setups:

Max objects per day

tps

100

200

1000

500

10000

1000

>10000+

1500

Kubernetes recommendations

  • Preferably use 2 load balancer (like Traefik) replica’s.

  • Use as many replica’s as available CPU’s taking into account you need to have a few replica’s for your load balancer, and possibly other services.