Hardware requirements for a smooth running

[AP3]

Hi everyone,

can you please help me what hardware specification I require if I want to host 150 forms and 100 workflows associated with it. No of users that will connect is around 100. Please reply or let me know from which way I can estimate it with the help of data. 

[AMolyneux]

Unfortunately, there’s no easy way to determine a hardware specification since each form, workflow and smartobject interaction will place a different load on your servers. The best bet is to follow the hardware requirements specification (as a bare minimum) as per the K2 Five installation guide (Nintex K2 Five Installation). and implement K2 in a high-load, high availability topology as detailed in the sample topologies section of the same guide. You can then easily scale up and out as your requirements and load grows.

[AP3]

Thanks for the reply. As i am totally new and is in process of recommendation to a new client so,
In the sample topology, I can find from where I can start in term of CPU, RAM and others.
Can you please take reference of your organization hardware specification and based on that please recommend.

[AMolyneux · Accepted solution]

As I posted, it’s impossible to specify a hardware specification that is guaranteed to deliver the performance requirements you need. All I can suggest is:

• Implement a topology like a Farm/NLB configuration for your production environment, with the minimum of a 2 K2 server configuration. The SQL Server can share physical resources with other SQL databases or SQL Server Instances on the same SQL server, or be located on a dedicated SQL server/instance, or be located on an Azure SQL DB.
• K2 recommends that SQL administrators track performance of the SQL server and address performance issues through standard Microsoft SQL Server scaling approaches.

• Start with a CPU and Memory sizing of the servers that is larger than the minimum requirement specified in the installation guide
• Follow the recommended guidance of installing the k2 websites and web services on the same physical machine as the K2 application server components
• Design your solutions to performance considerations in mind. Here are some articles that may help: Performance Considerations - SmartForms - Nintex Community and Performance Considerations - K2 Server Hardware an... - Nintex Community
• Monitor the solution and if you see there are performance issues, add addition servers to the NLB and/or add additional memory or CPU resources to the servers.

[tbyrne777]

As others have said, there is no hard and fast rule for determining hardware requirements as it would vary based on just how complex your forms/workflows/integrations are. In general, I've found the K2 server to be fairly efficient since much of the work of processing a form is offloaded to client machine. Looking at some production servers we have in place today I see some getting by with just 8GB of RAM and 4 cores at 2.4 GHz. That should be your minimum starting point, though I would say 16GB of RAM would give you headroom for growth.