Jabber.org migrated to ejabberd

Jabber.org, the public Jabber server of the Jabber Software Foundation (JSF) migrated from jabberd 1.4 CVS to ejabberd 1.0.0 on February 26, 2006.

Since jabber.org went on the air back in 1999, it always used jabberd 1 and previous versions. In fact, it was the first Jabber server deployment ever. Short thereafter, jabber.org was followed by other jabberd 1 deployments. Later, alternative server software began to appear. Nevertheless, the public service offered by jabber.org, as well as the open-source jabberd 1, have always been the reference.

Being the best known and biggest reference Jabber server gives relevance to factors such as stability, scalability, and absence of memory leaks. During the past years, jabberd 1 was coupled with a propietary connection manager provided by Jabber, Inc. to serve the sky-high demands of such a huge deployment: 5,000 - 10,000 concurrent client connections besides 500 - 2,000 connected servers approx.

Peter Saint-Andre, executive director of the Jabber Software Foundation, sent a message to the JUser mailing list:

FYI, the jabber.org IM server was upgraded to the ejabberd software this weekend. Since we're not familiar with running this software, it is possible that we still need to tweak some settings etc. Please patient as we work through these issues.

Special thanks to Peter Millard for completing the conversion, and to the ejabberd team for the software. :-)

Peter

He also posted the blog entry e-jabbering to his blog:

New software at jabber.org.

This weekend, Peter Millard updated the jabber.org server to run ejabberd instead of our old hodgepodge of various different software packages. It seems we still have some kinks to work out, but overall it's working well so far. Expect Peter to report more fully soon regarding the migration experience.

Thanks to the ejabberd team for the software, and to Peter for his diligence in making the switch a reality!

Posted on 2006-02-26 at 22:05.

The previously referenced Peter Millard is jabber.org's main server administrator. In this not so recent interview he explains that his involvement in the Jabber community started in 1999 by developing WinJab, an open-source Jabber client for Microsoft Windows. In 2000 he started the development of JabberCOM and finally the WinJab successor Exodus. Currently he works for Jabber, Inc. developing a propietary Jabber server.

The press release Jabber.org adopts ejabberd lists three reasons for the migration:

• Freedom: 'The JSF is committed to using open-source software whenever possible'
• Stability: 'We needed to switch from our older setup, which had some fairly serious stability issues'
• Scalability: '[One solution was to] use an open-source server that could meet our scalability needs. From our knowledge of existing large deployments [...] as well as test results posted on the Internet, that meant ejabberd.'

More information:

• Peter Millard blogged about the process of installing ejabberd on jabber.org.
• There is information about the current configuration on their statistics page.