What's up with the wild world of conference calls? Let's have a look at
the past, present and future of TDF's Jitsi.
On Friday, 13th March 2020 there was a public board meeting with an
unexpectedly high attendance of nearly 30 people. It was noted that the
virtual machine resources maxed out due to the load on Jitsi. While the
result was disappointing, the strategy of the infra team had all along
been to gradually increase the VM resources based on demand. There is no
point in paying extra for something you don't use, after all. The VM
resources were beefed up soon after the board meeting.
On Wednesday, 18th March 2020 we organised an ad hoc load testing
session for Jitsi to see how the newly-increased resources affected the
experience. The session included video streams and screensharing. Now
the indication was that client software for some people was struggling
with CPU load. Jitsi configuration was tweaked based on this: calls were
made audio-only by default, for example.
Research into Jitsi's current development and known issues followed.
Jitsi developers acknowledged that the web UI was heavy in some respects
and said they were optimising it. A known issue was that Firefox users
could have a negative effect on the bandwidth use of all participants in
a call, when screensharing was used. We had not really considered this.
All we knew since the beginning of TDF Jitsi deployment was that Firefox
itself might not work reliably.
After running into a user report saying that Firefox was causing
problems even with audio-only calls, we decided to do a simple
experiment in a TDF team call (Tuesday, 7th April 2020). I joined the
call as the only Firefox user for 5 minutes and then switched to
Chromium. A person who regularly had substandard experience in Jitsi
calls reported that the difference was night and day: with no Firefox
users in the call, the quality was perfect.
A future with a browser monoculture in conference calls seemed
terrifying, but thankfully both Jitsi and Firefox developers were
working feverishly to make things better.
On Friday, 17th April 2020 a stable release was cut for Jitsi Meet with
many Firefox-related improvements. It was deployed on TDF infra soon
after. Based on the communication, the current nightly release of
Firefox should work fine with the latest Jitsi Meet, while for stable
Firefox (75) the only change was disabling a feature called simulcast
(it allows the sending of multiple video streams with varying
bandwidths/quality at once).
On Tuesday, 21st April 2020 I made another experiment in a TDF team
call. I first joined with Firefox nightly for 5 minutes and then
switched to stable Firefox for the rest of the meeting. The results were
very promising: other participants observed no issues with Firefox
nightly and only a single instance of audio cutting with stable Firefox
during 30 minutes.
The current Firefox nightly represents what will become version 77. The
stable release date for 77 is 2nd June 2020:
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Release_Management/Calendar
All Jitsi Meet -related Firefox issues can be seen here:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?status_whiteboard_type=substring&status_whiteboard=jitsi-meet&list_id=15210150
Bonus topic: during all the focus on Jitsi and its issues, it came up
that it has rather poor accessibility support. Fortunately some people
from the user community have already contributed patches that improve
the situation during the past couple of weeks. Known a11y issues are
tracked in this meta report: https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/issues/6090
Ilmari
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