The preceding configurations should be interpreted as guidelines. To determine your requirements, test the software's performance in your network environment. There are many alternatives offered by hardware vendors that fall in the same general categories. Also, based on your personal preference, you may get the job done with less powerful hardware. A smaller configuration will certainly handle 25,000 flow updates per second, but it will take additional time to display graphs and tables, will be able to host fewer active connections gracefully (including NBI detectors) and in extreme cases may drop flows during periods of high disk usage.

	Note
	Remember that most flow exporters send multiple updates per flow, so that the updates/second rate is on average 2x-3x higher than the flows/second rate.

In demanding environments (such as those with a flow load higher than 25,000 updates per second, many FlowTraq users, or heavy external API/script usage), you may need to run more than one FlowTraq server in a cluster configuration. This automatically balances the processing load over multiple systems and is completely transparent to the user. A cluster of 8 FlowTraq nodes can generally handle a 200,000 update per second load with a similar speed to a single node handling 25,000 updates per second. Contact FlowTraq support for guidance.

Caution: 32-bit environments

Although FlowTraq will work in a 32-bit environment, we strongly recommend that FlowTraq Server be installed on a 64-bit platform. On 32-bit platforms, FlowTraq Server will only be able to use approximately 3GB of RAM. This is unlikely to be sufficient in most environments. Using a 64-bit operating system will allow FlowTraq Server software to allocate more RAM, which allows for a longer instant recall history and a higher input flow rate. Note that in order to be able to take advantage of a 64-bit platform, both the CPU and the operating system must be 64-bit. The FlowTraq vApp is a 64-bit system which can be configured to use large quantities of RAM if needed.

	Caution: shared environments
	FlowTraq is a very resource-intensive program, and its performance can be greatly impacted by other tasks and software running in its environment, particularly disk-intensive applications. In a shared virtual environment, it is important to consider carefully the impact of other virtual machines on core and RAM availability, and on disk throughput.