Hi,

I have an application with the following characteristics and am trying to determine if Stunnel would be a suitable option for securing my transmissions (in particular, will it scale):

- Each of my clients is connected to the Internet via a 56Kbps modem. My server has whatever bandwidth it needs.

- Each client "transaction" consists of (a) connecting to a central server using a TCP/IP-based protocol, (b) uploading a 512KB block of data and (c) disconnecting.

- Our server needs to be able to handle 2000 concurrent clients under peak loads.

- Under the peak load above, I would like to limit the time a client takes to perform a "transaction" to around five minutes or so (uploading 512KB at (56Kbps / 2) = 28Kbps should take ~2.5 minutes).

My questions are:

(1) Do I have any reason to believe that Stunnel will simply not be able to scale to handle the load described above (i.e. a steady load of 2000 concurrent clients connecting, uploading half a megabyte of data and disconnecting)?

(2) If Stunnel can handle this - do you have any thoughts on what sort of machine (or machines) I should be running my server-side Stunnel daemon(s) on? I am particularly concerned about CPU usage.

I apologize in advance for any overlap between this query and past threads in the archive/information on the website - I wanted to make sure that I ran the specific requirements above past somebody with experience using Stunnel.

Thanks,

Ankur