I have an HP G7 Server having 24 Xeon E659 @ 2.53 GHz with 128 GB of ram no graphic card running linux 6.2 Santiago.
2 x 10 Gb NIC bond and link aggregation of 20G on connecting switch.
I have 1 Gbps bandwidth that can burst upto 10 Gbps from my service provider.
Serving adaptive bitrate stream of 360 480 & 720.
How many connections can i serve???
The number of connections is mainly determined by the available bandwidth. What you’re not telling here, is the bitrate of each of the streams. A very rough calculation is to divide the available bandwidth by the average bitrate per stream multiplied by 1.2, thus
[available bandwidth] / ([average bitrate per stream] x 1.2)
If you can burst up to 10Gbps, let’s assume an average bitrate of 2Mbps, then the max. connections is 10000 / 2 x 1.2 = 4166. However, if you only serve HTTP streams (HLS, MPEG-DASH), then the real number of connection may be much more, because it depends on how fast Wowza can handle HTTP request, and serve HLS chunk, or MPEG-DASH segment, to the client. Last year, I managed almost 50K connections of a 500kbps stream on an 1Gbps in an optimized test environment.
There’s no need to bond the NICs if the max. burst with your service provider is 10G. And remember to optimize the Linux kernel for 10G. There are lots of articles for this on the net, a simple one is http://10gbe.blogspot.no/2014/10/10gbe-server-adapter-network.html; one specifically for RHEL is https://access.redhat.com/sites/default/files/attachments/20150325_network_performance_tuning.pdf, but make sure the recommendations are still actual for the newer kernel version.
@Karel Boek Thank you for the answer.
This completely satisfies my question in place. Just one thing, I wanted to ask is does ram & CPU has anything to do with the max concurrent sessions as on one of my streaming servers I am serving like 6 like feeds with Wowza transcoder on for multiple bitrates & it’s CPU is lik 80% all the time?
Thank you for being helpful
In a situation without transcoder, RAM and CPU are definitely important factors too. It’s just that, in most cases, the network interface is the bottleneck (exceptions are situations where you have a disproportion, like a single-core CPU, or 2GB RAM alongside a 10Gbps NIC)
In a situation with transcoding enabled, the case becomes different. Transcoding is a very CPU-intensive process; each incoming feed must be decoded, and then re-encoded to the different new bitrates (in your case, 720p, 480p and 360p). That means that the bottleneck now becomes the CPU, and the number of streams you can serve from a server simultaneously is much more limited. Don’t confuse this with client connections though: one incoming stream can still have 1000s of clients. It’s not the number of client connections that gets limited, but the number of concurrent incoming feeds.
There are several options to build a successful business case when you need transcoding. On option is to consider either an NVidia GPU in your server, or use multiple smaller servers with CPUs that have Intel QuickSync. There are also live and VOD transcoding services available online; some built-in with a complete streaming service (e.g. Wowza Cloud), some as separate service.
If you’re interested in Live transcoding as a separate service, drop me an email: karel.boek@raskenlund.com
Thank you this indeed helped alot. I hope you won’t mind me asking some more question @Karel Boek
Yes, you may contact me directly on karel.boek@raskenlund.com
i have 32 gb ram and cor i 7 cpu 8 core
and 100 mb internet speed
can you tell me how many max viewer can watch my stream on 500 kb bitrate?
if i have 32 gb ram and intel core i7 cpu 8 core
and 100 mb internet speed
how many max viewers i could have on my stream if bitrate was 500 kb
With regards to bandwidth usage you should always leave 20 percent of your bandwidth untouched for TCP overhead. In a best case scenario it looks like you may be able to fit 20 players within that 80 percent value.
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=100mb+%2F+500kb+*.8
We also have an article on how to find the right size server for your needs.
https://www.wowza.com/blog/4-tips-for-sizing-streaming-server-hardware