Hello,
We’ll soon be buying 2 10Gbit servers for Wowza streaming, however we’re not sure what kind of CPU power we need.
The servers we will be buying are Dell PowerEdge R510’s with Broadcom NetXtreme II 57711 10Gbit NIC’s. The NIC makes use of TCP Offload Engine which should help reduce the CPU load.
We currently have the Intel Xeon E5620 CPU in mind for the server. Does anyone have experience with streaming 10Gbit (8-9 Gbit minus overhead) with this CPU or similar? Will this one CPU cut it, or will we need 2 of those?
Sander
Hi
I can’t advise on hardware you will have to do your own research on that I’m afraid.
However I can tell you that Java can only shift about 5Gbps and so you will need to be running 2 instances of Wowza.
You can do this on the same server at the same time, just thought you would like to know before hand.
Jason
There is Java limitation of about 5gbs throughput. The way to saturate the whole 10gbs (minus overhead) is by installing two instances of Wowza on one machine.
Richard
What I’m now however more interested in is whether the CPU I want is enough to stream 10Gbit or whether I need 2 of them, or even 2 better processors.
To get 10gbs (minus overhead) output from one server it will need to be a late model dual quad cpu, 8g ram, 64bit OS and 64bit Java JDK, be well tuned, and two instances of Wowza.
We have a load test tool. To get it you have to write to test@wowza.com, there is a document to sign and return.
Yes, you can use the license that was being used on server that has since failed on a working server.
Richard
Thank you for the information Jason.
Researching on what hardware to use is kind of a difficult task, not a lot of people appear to be using 10Gbit NIC’s, or atleast there is not a lot of information about it. The Wowza FAQ does give some information regarding 10Gbit streaming but it’s very unclear on what’s needed. Testing it myself with old hardware has been giving very different results also.
Yes, I’m aware of that thanks to Jason’s reply. What I’m now however more interested in is whether the CPU I want is enough to stream 10Gbit or whether I need 2 of them, or even 2 better processors.
Also I plan to only do 5Gbps of streaming per server, but should one server fail, I want the other one to have enough CPU power to handle 10Gbps(minus overhead). On a sidenote, is it allowed to use the Wowza license of the failed server for a second Wowza instance on the other server(assuming a 2-server setup), there will be only one Wowza instance connected to the internet at a time per license.