Home chat room size

An iVisit Plus Account has a home chat room for 8 people by default. The room size can be set by the server Admin at any value from 1 to 16 however, there are performance issues when increasing the size above 8 so this is only allowed in specific circumstances.

iVisit uses peer-to-peer transport between each individual user. Your personal video, audio, public and private room chat goes directly to those people who are connected to you via UDP Port 9940. The connection between the iVisit software and the ivisit.net server is less than .6k/second and is only there to;

a) authenticate users and enable calls
b) display the Community Directory of homes
c) enable instant messaging and offline storage

Peer-to-peer conference connection examples; 2,4,8,10,12,16

2 people (requires 2 links), 4 people (requires 4x3=12 links)

In an 8-person conference each person requires 7 connections so there's a web of 56 links spanning the globe. This is the maximum size at which iVisit can be sure of stability and performance across the open Internet. Increasing the room size by 2 is not 8+2=10, it's 56+34 = 90 connections required. An increase of 64% in complexity and demand on systems / infrastructure.

12 people requires 132 connections (13=156, 14=182, 15=210) and a 16 person conference requires 240 connections to operate successfully!

Making a room 2 times bigger in fact makes it over 4 times as complex (56 to 240 links) and hence, much more liable to disturbance from packet loss, slow downs, router outages and so on. There is only so much the iVisit Bandwidth Manager can do to compensate for such conditions and any room >8 can experience users "poofing" (vanishing) from the Guest List as their connection looses synch with the others and/or drops its server connection. If any of the 16 are on a non-broadband connection then it will be problematic as Chat synchronization and other timing will be impacted.

The Good News: Using your own in-house server, on a LAN, VPN, even the same ISP or cable provider, should be fine with larger sized rooms.