Defining Your Instant Messaging User Base or Site Profile

Once you establish a usage profile, compare it to sample pre-defined user bases that are described in this section. A user base is made up of the types of Instant Messaging operations that your users will perform. Instant Messaging users fall into one of these user bases:

• Casual Users

• Heavy Users

The sample user bases described in this section broadly generalize user behavior. Your particular usage profile might not exactly match the user bases; you will be able to adjust these differences when you run your load simulator (as described in Using an Instant Messaging Load Simulator).

Casual Users

A lightweight user base typically consists of users with simple Instant Messaging requirements. These users rarely initiate chat sessions and rarely receive invitations. They might only use Instant Messaging as a presence tool.

Heavy Users

A heavy user uses significantly more system resources than a casual user. Typical usage for a this type of user may be something like the following:

• Presence updates equal to or greater than 20 times a day.

• Contact list contains about 30 contacts.

• Subscribes to the presence updates of all the contacts in the contact list.

• Sets up around four conferences or chats per day where each conference has three people in the conference room and lasts an average of 10 minutes, and a message is added to the conference every 1-15 seconds.