[GTALUG] téléconferencing options, was GTALUG: COVID-19 Impact

[Alex Volkov]

Hey Znoteer,

Do you have a rough estimate how much CPU bigbluebutton was using during 
the conference and for how many people?


So far I've been inclining to spin up a VM with 4-8 dedicated CPUs that 
should give some extra headroom for our average meeting size, and have 
Zoom as a backup.
My only problem with zoom is that it requires to install proprietary 
client, which I might not work on every linux distro  and not everyone 
might everyone will agree to use.

We were planning to have a Q&A session, we don't need video recording 
feature as we don't record Q&A as a matter of preference.

I also opened a pool on which video conferencing solution we should use 
for the next meeting -- https://mastodon.social/@gtalug/103886518041900393

I was convinced to try out Jitsi following this thread -- 
https://octodon.social/@cwebber/103811788098843117


I like Jitsi because:
* Fully open-source
* Doesn't require browser plugins
* easy to set up with let's encrypt
* I already wrote some ansible scripts that help me create working 
servers quickly

I don't like Jitsi:
* iOS app is a bit confusing
* I had some issues with video-bridge and nginx fighting over https port 
on the server


For our executive meeting of 5 people having video calls at the same 
time  Jitsi was using 60% of CPU on the smallest instance, probably due 
to all of the encryption going on. We were using the smallest hetzner 
instance available 1vcpu/2GB ram in Finland and I don't think that we've 
had excessive lag there.

For the main meeting I'm planning to use one of the linode servers with 
dedicated CPUs based in Toronto.

Alex.






On 2020-03-26 6:01 p.m., Znoteer via talk wrote:
> Hi (lurker in Montreal, here),
>
> On Thu, Mar 26, 2020 at 04:06:26PM -0400, Christopher Browne via talk wrote:
>> On Thu, 26 Mar 2020 at 14:42, Rouben via talk <talk at gtalug.org> wrote:
>>
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> Long-time lurker here.
>>>
>>> I’d be happy to provide virtual hosting for GTA LUG proceedings and
>>> meetings via Zoom or MS Teams. I work at UofT and I believe I can get GTA
>>> LUG meetings hosted on our infrastructure.
>>>
>     [snip]
>> Our last board meeting we used the "libre" option, Jitsi, for which Alex
>> has set up a VM.  Alex seems to be proposing to spin up an instance of
>> that.  I suggest getting in on the conversation about that.
>>
>> To my mind, having more possible solutions is better than having fewer,
>> although we'll need to pick something specific pretty soon :-).
> [snip]
>
> The local Debian group tried out BigBlueButton a couple of days ago.  It's
> similar to jitsi and is also opensource.  We were hitting an instance in Italy
> so there was some lag on the audio, though the video seemed to be pretty
> instantaneous.
>
> https://bigbluebutton.org/
>