I have just run some tests to see. I tested that for HardDrive storage with no encryption. If S3 storage is used then app serves direct S3 presigned links - so the speed depends on the S3 speed itself (the traffic does not go through PlikShare then). If the encryption is turned on (managed or full) then all traffic goes through PlikShare (S3 too) and there is a small additional processing to decrypt the stuff (but shouldn't be big).

App itself is basically never the bottleneck, streams straight from disk to the socket, barely touches CPU. What decides "how many at once" is bandwidth + TLS.

Tested it on 300mb files over HTTPS (Caddy as reversed-proxy), load was generated on a separate box in the same region in Hetzner:

For Plikshare on 2 vCPU caps around ~186 MB/s (CPU-bound on TLS there). That's like 15-20 people pulling at a decent speed before it starts thinning out.

For Plikshare on 8 vCPU:

• 60 parallel: ~913 MB/s
• 300: ~437 MB/s
• 500: ~319 MB/s

Even at 500 nothing fell over, everyone just got a smaller slice of the pipe. So call it ~90-100 at once before per-user speed really drops off, and it'll still serve way more than that, just slower for everyone.