Caucus System Requirements for NT

This page describes the technical and system requirements necessary to run Caucus on a Windows/NT host server.

Caucus requires Windows NT 4.0, either "Server" or "Workstation".  It must be installed on the same host that is running a compatible web server.  The Caucus installation process creates its own userid ("account", in NT parlance), which owns and contains all of the Caucus data files and programs. 

The rest of this page describes specific system requirements and resource usage.

Web Server Requirements:
Caucus has been tested with the Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS, version 2.0 or higher), and the O'Reilly WebSite server.  It is likely that Caucus will work with other commercial-grade NT web servers.  (See General Web Server Configuration for more details.)

Disk Space Requirements:
The Caucus kit requires less than 20 megabytes to install.  We recommend, however, starting with 100MB of space to allow room for growth of the conferences.

Memory Requirements:
Caucus can run on systems as small as an Intel 486 with 16MB of memory, although in practice we recommend 32 MB at least.  Caucus uses approximately (N + 1) * 0.6 MB of memory, where N is the number of simultaneous Caucus users.

Process Requirements:
Each simultaneous Caucus user gets one dedicated "daemon" or server process for the duration of their session.  In addition, the request for each Caucus page involves two other processes: an httpd (web server) process, and a temporary lightweight process called "swebsock". 

Thus, the process load for N simultaneous Caucus users varies from N to 3 * N, depending on how rapidly Caucus requests are being served.  A typical number is about 1.5 * N.