Hardware requirements

Based on our initial performance tests in both a Kubernetes environment and 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

Based on functional performance test scenario’s and requirements, 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: 5 minutes (lower means more requests per second)

Concurrent users

Expected requests per second

100

3

250

6

500

12

1.000

24

2.000

47

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.

General recommendations

  • Use a separate database server with roughly a third of the CPUs and memory as the main server. The database is usually the limiting factor.

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.