Commercial Hosting

Mumble (and Murmur) are open source, and therefore completely free of charge. However, to fully experience the quality of Mumble, a quality server with good network connection is needed. Home-based DSL or Cable servers are far from optimal, and do not scale to much more than 5-6 users.

We are therefore interested in facilitating commercial hosting of Murmur, to enable users who lack either the server hardware and network connection or the skill to compile and maintain Murmur to use Mumble.

This page is specifically targeted at commercial hosting providers. This is where we'll present a short summary of Murmur's expected resource requirements, and where you can edit it to provide us with information on what you need to make your job easier.

If you aren't looking to start a host yourself, and are just looking for a commercial host, the Mumble Wiki maintains a non-exhaustive list of hosts.

= Murmur technical requirements =

Murmur runs on any operating system where Qt can compile. At the moment, that is "most" UNIXes, Windows and MacOSX. Our internal testserver runs on Linux, and a binary version for Windows is included in the mumble installer.

Based on data from out testserver, murmur will use about 40 MB of virtual memory, of which about 4 MB are resident in physical memory.

Since only minimal processing, as required for cryptography and "visibility checks" between users, is done serverside, we were not able to push even 1% of actual CPU usage with 4 users on a Xeon 3.4Ghz. We do see quite a few context switches though, so quality network cards and infrastructure capable of handling high packet load are recommended on servers hosting a big number of clients.

Mumble uses CELT, and using the highest quality and lowest latency, the peak bandwidth is 134kbit/s per speaker per listener (with IP and UDP overhead). However, this is the max bandwidth, and the recommended bandwidth (that has a very unnoticeable quality reduction for normal speech) is 63kbit/s. In other words, a server with 10 users and 1 user speaking will need to replicate the datastream 9 times, for a total of 63*9=567kbit/s outgoing bandwidth. If all 10 users speak at once, each stream has to be replicated 9 times, for a total of 63kbit/s*9*10=5.67 Mbit/s. Note that these are absolute worst-case scenarios, and the average bandwidth use is around 20-30 kbit/s during speech, multiplied by the number of listeners; it is only possibly in a real world scenario for at most two people to be talking at the same time and still understand what they are saying.

As one data point you can take a look at silencerru's post about the resource usage for a ~800 user server in the forum.

= Licensing =

Murmur and Mumble is BSD and GPL licensed, which means that much like the Linux kernel, you are free to use it in commercial hosting without royalties. You are selling a service, not a program.

If you want to repackage and rebrand the client without also distributing its source code, the Mumble source code is BSD licensed, which allows you to do this. You will also need commercial licenses for the packages Mumble uses, namely Qt and Ice, as well as a patent license for OCB. The owners of these packages and patents have all kindly granted Mumble a license, but that only covers open source distribution. Note that if you just use our binaries from sourceforge, you don't need to worry about any of this.

= Requirements for Murmur for adoption by commercial providers =

I'll note down what I can imagine commercial hosting providers would like to see implemented in Murmur before they start offering it as a service. If you are a commercial provider, please comment in the discussion section (even if you agree, it helps to know we're on the right track), or add new sections.

Ability to limit number of users
Set the "users" parameter in murmur.ini

Ability to limit audio quality
Set the "bandwidth" parameter in murmur.ini, which limits the per-user incoming bandwidth. Multiply this by the number of users in a channel to find the used outgoing bandwidth per active speaker.

No frills ACLs and Groups
The multi-channel ACL and Groups system in Mumble enables easy setup of linked channels that can match most any scenario. On the downside, it's also easy to mess up, especially if you're an inexperienced user. While this might ultimately be up to the hosting providers, we should probably provide a small example of how to use a webpage to "configure" a very basic access system, and give no users the actual "Write" bit, even the admin. This would allow those users who feel they are competent enough to log in with superuser and foul things up as much as they want, and will also allow for simple management for less sophisticated users.

If anyone wishes to do so, this can be done through the Ice RPC interface of Murmur.

SQL-Server
The default and recommended SQL engine for Murmur is SQLite, since it is faster than all the other alternatives and requires less resources. From 0.9.5 onwards, Murmur also supports MySQL.

Multiserver support
From version 1.1.0 onwards, Murmur fully supports multiple independent virtual servers per process.

Additional servers can be added either with the Ice or DBus RPC interface. You can use the newServer call which returns a server id, then use start(id) or stop(id) to stop the server. Before you start it, you probably want to configure it, which is done through setConf(serverid, key, value). Known configuration keys are: If a config key is not present, the default is to take the value from the .ini file (except port, which defaults to inifile+server_id-1)
 * host - IP bound to
 * password - server PW
 * port - server port
 * timeout - client inactivity timeout
 * bandwidth - bandwidth restriction
 * users - max # of users
 * welcometext - the blurb sent by the server on connect
 * registername, registerpassword, registerhostname, registerurl - The data for registration in the public server list
 * certificate - x509 certificate in PEM form
 * sslkey - x509 private key in PEM form

RPC
Murmur supports Ice RPC calls, which allow querying all information of the server in real time, and also allow management. Hence, it's fairly easy to write scripts to query and display server status, and also to create web frontends for server administration.

Here is a list of the web-interfaces available.

Ice has all but replaced DBus, given it's multi-platform features and usability.