Apologies in advance if this is posted in the wrong section.
I am looking to distribute a 800MB package to roughly 500+ clients. Is there a way to set a limit on the number of clients allowed to download the installation at a given time? Currently all 500+ clients reach out to the main/relay servers to grab the package….what I want to do is limit this to x amount at a time total or x amount per relay server at any given time.
Dynamic Throttling will help us prevent saturation, however I’d like to modify the number of simultaneous downloads to increase the rate at which each client will receive the entire download package.
I would use the temporal distribution option in the Take Action Dialog to spread the load. Alternatively, if you’re dealing with distributed relays you could target them first, then your endpoints in a separate job. From the sound of things I’m guessing your relays are fairly central though? Maybe more relays are in order?
Thanks for the temporal distribution reference. I had initially put 5 minutes in staggering, expecting each client to wait 5 minutes before downloading/executing. I was very suprised to find how many were trying to download within the first two minutes. I’m guessing now that I should have put 750 minutes to do 500 of the clients?
In case anyone else was wondering about this, I was told by support that there is no way to limit the number of simultaneous downloads for a given distribution package.
I sit near the support guys, so we’ve just been talking about this
Everything is a pull in this system, and the clients are all getting told about the new thing to pull by a UDP ping. Temporal distribution tells them to wait a random time before they do something about the pull. The relay takes care of making sure that this doesn’t cause trouble – if a few hundred machines hit a relay to request the same file at the same time, the relay just downloads once before serving the masses.
You might want to investigate some of the bandwidth throttling options, but I think the key to getting the type of behavior that you seem to be after is to make sure that there’s a relay on the other end of any bandwidth sensitive links. In other words, a rack of powerful dedicated relay servers sitting in a hub site can work if bandwidth throttling is very carefully tuned, but is less efficient than promoting one cash register in every store to be a relay.
By design, we don’t want you to worry about controlling bandwidth per job… We think you should set your throttling options (including “outbound throttling” http://support.bigfix.com/bes/misc/besthrottling.html) to be safe setting and then let everything go as fast as it can…
Temporal distribution is supposed to be the option that is per-action to control how fast it runs… You should set it to 2500 minutes to make 1 agent download each 5 minutes… (but that is pretty slow)…
Thanks for your help thus far. The action that I put together downloads the 800MB file, runs an uninstall command to remove the old version, and then extracts and runs the setup command for the new version. During my deployment, I’ve noticed that on some clients, it almost seems as though the client sleeps…so all it does is download the file. If I log on the system, it will start the uninstall and then run the install. This is only on some clients, others have no problems and finish without issue. Is this something that command polling would help resolve?
It seems to dowload the file, then shows running. On some, it seems to sit until the user returns to the system or someone logs on to the system. After this is done, the tmp file shows up and sits for about 30+ minutes and then it extracts and runs the setup.
