Group Chat Presence Polling (R2)

We are working on a new blog post for NextHop on monitoring an OCS 2007 R2 deployment with Group Chat. One thing I wanted to put here was an illustration of the behaviors with the # of clients, the number of contacts or channel members and the impact of multiple open channels, you knew you could undock a channel right? Let me also note that the only real change with Lync is that it defaults to a polling interval of every 5 minutes by default instead of the 2 minutes of R2. 2277375 documents the change made in Group Chat CU6.

In the table above I want to call out a few items:

Row 4 states the polling of once every 2 minutes, this is the 28.8 value in columns C, D and E. Column B is illustrating a lower value of 14 which is approximately every 4 minutes. Notice how the polling of 20000 users with this rate compares to 3000 users who have fewer contacts but have 7 open channels at one time.

I share this information for a few reasons

1. First is that this came as a result of working through a customer topology and the content not existing for reference but something we came up in those discussions.
2. The second reason I share this is that the idea of multiple monitors or multiple open channels was something we have overlooked in early discussions because most people run the solution full screen and switch between channels. This customer had an audience with multiple monitors so they could undock many channels and monitor all at once, and as we had no other calculations we assumed the worst case that no channel had the same members so we had to poll for all users.
3. The third reason is that as we worked with this customer we sought a change to the polling so it could be decreased to a value resulting in polling every 4 or 5 minutes we could double the load whether that was more contacts polled per channel or more users with the same original # of contacts per channel.

I will update this post when the NextHop article is published.

Toml GCKid

ps – While I feel comfortable with what I blog about personally here and what I contribute to on NextHop, the addition of content on the Technet Wiki is something I worry about causing fragmentation. If you have thoughts, feedback or comments about the experience please let me know as the goal is to increase the value of content, not to increase the number of places.