Simulating a variable number of users connected

[itnorm]

Thanks for your reply.  I'm assuming your for Deciso.  I've been looking at their appliances.  Specifically, the DEC675. That says it can do 3 million concurrent connections.  How many users would that translate into?  And how many apps would that mean?  I know there is no perfect number or average user, but roughly?

It seems unlikely it can handle a million users or even 100,000 at 30 connections per user.

I'm interested in what it could do with a flat network and say each user has 1 video running and 10 open tabs for 1 browser.

[itnorm]

(duplicate)

[Patrick M. Hausen]

An open tab that is idle commonly has got zero open connections. The content for a web page is downloaded, rendered, displayed, and the connection closed. Originally browsers used a maximum of four concurrent connections. This might have changed, I don't know. Dynamic web apps with a rich Javascript frontend might behave differently.

You cannot have a hundred thousand users in a flat network. Even with IPv6 and a plethora of addresses a broadcast domain larger than a couple of thousand will bring your network to a meltdown.

How many users are you planning for, anyway? What is the network topology? How many of them are working at the same time?

Maybe you should contact Deciso if you plan an installation this big that it gives you serious performance concerns.

And no, apart from one or two regulars nobody here works for Deciso, including myself. This is a community forum, not the Deciso support channel. If you need authoritative information from them, call or send an email.

[itnorm]

Thanks for your reply.
I was merely giving some assumptions upon which to base a rough estimate of users, i.e. flat network and what each typical user was doing at any one time.  This should simplify how to make sense of the fw/hw numbers, e.g. 3 million concurrent connections.

Why then do fw/hw companies spec out multiple concurrent connections if it doesn't represent anything realistic as far as what a firewall can handle for users?

I never intend to provide a fw for that many users, just wanting to have a way to look at the published numbers and be relatively certain it will work in the network of interest.

[Patrick M. Hausen]

A firewall is also used to protect up to hundreds or thousands of physical or virtual servers each of which might serve tens or hundreds of thousands of clients at a time.