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P4 Server Administration Documentation | 2025.2

# Hardware, sizing, and capacity

For an initial deployment of a distributed Perforce service, where the commit server acts in a hybrid mode, the commit server uses your current central server hardware. Over time, you might see the performance load on the commit server drop as you add more edge servers. You might reevaluate commit server hardware sizing after the first year of operation.

An edge server handles a significant amount of work for users connected to that edge server. A sensible strategy is to repurpose an existing forwarding replica and monitor the performance load on that hardware. Repurposing a forwarding replica involves the following:

- Reconfiguring the forwarding replica as an edge server.
- Creating new workspaces on the edge server or transferring existing workspaces to the edge server. Existing workspaces can be transferred using ``p4 unload`` and ``p4 reload`` commands. For details, see Migrate to Commit-Edge.

As you deploy more edge servers, you have the option to deploy fewer edge servers on more powerful hardware, or a to deploy more edge servers, each using less powerful hardware, to service a smaller number of users.

You can also take advantage of replication filtering to reduce the volume of metadata and archive content on an edge server.

An edge server maintains a unique copy of local workspace metadata, which is not shared with other edge servers or with the commit server.

Filtering edge server content can reduce the demands for storage and performance capacity.

As you transition to commit-edge architecture and the commit server is only handling requests from edge servers, you might find that an edge server requires more hardware resources than the commit server.

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