Performance VOD Streaming - pingTimeout problem

Wowza Streaming Engine
1

Hi,

I have a dedicated server with the following specifications:

Intel Xeon 3220-Quad Core 2.4GHz

8 GB Ram

Four 500 GB SATA II HDs (WD5002ABYS) with RAID10

1Gbps Network

I checked the access logs and see many messages: client connectionClosed [1714488370] pingtimeout

What can it be? Anyone can I help me? I have an average of 70 concurrent users only watching different files and my server is tuned.

I use jwplayer/flowplayer and I don’t see RTMPT connections in logs, just RTMP.

Thanks!

2

Are you using RTMPT? if so can you use RTMP instead? RTMPT is more fragile and results in more frequent ping timeouts.

Salvadore

3

It is a normal occurrence. Wowza is disconnecting its side of a NetConnection when Wowza no longer senses the client that established that connection. House cleaning. So, by itself, this is not a problem. Is there something about the pattern or number of these that is a problem? It does happen more frequently with RTMPT but the pingTimeout/ValidationFrequency checks RTMP connections as well and disconnects as necessary. Active connections are not disconnected.

Richard

4

The observation that it is related to poor internet connections is correct. And Wowza has to deal with lost connections, whatever you want to call it, Wowza disconnects when it senses a lost connection. You do have control of this through the Application.xml /PingTimeOut and /ValidationFrequency settings. These are documented in the configuration giude

PingTimeout

The time (in milliseconds) that the server will wait for a ping response from the client. The ping mechanism is an RTMP internal ping (not an ICMP ping) that’s used to validate a client connection. If set to 0, the server will wait indefinitely. If this value isn’t provided (section commented-out), the value set in the VHost.xml file is used.

ValidationFrequency

The time (in milliseconds) that the server will wait during server-to-client validation. Validation only occurs if the client stops sending data to the server. Validation is done by sending a ping request from the server to the client. If set to 0, the server won’t validate client connections. If this value isn’t provided (section commented-out), the value set in the

Richard

5

To adjust in your case, increase the default values: wait longer for a ping response, and wait longer between pingTimeouts (ValidationFrequency). I would be cautious and incremental in changes. Otherwise, I can’t say what exactly to set these to.

Richard

6

Increasing these numbers might avoid disconnecting a client in some cases, but if the client is gone it is gone. Wowza is going to disconnect unless you turn this feature off.

Richard

7

Are you using RTMPT? if so can you use RTMP instead? RTMPT is more fragile and results in more frequent ping timeouts.

Salvadore

I know, i dont use RTMPT, just RTMP! My users dont have firewall block of port 1935.

8

Can anyone help me? I’m still having many problems with pingTimeout!

The default config is pingTimeout 12seconds ValidationFrequency and 20seconds. What the value I should increase to solve my problem?

Thanks!

9

Richard,

Thank you for your feedback. I have received complaints from users who are watching the video and suddenly it stops, being necessary to press play again to watch it from the beginning. I analyzed the logs and saw that many IPs that have the PingTimeout immediately click on play to watch the video again, so I believe that is not a “House Cleaning”.

I think some of those who suffer with PingTimeout have poor Internet connection.

However, I would like to minimize that amount of pintTimeout to not prejudice those users of poor connections. For this, I must increase PingTimeout and validfrequency, right? For what values should I increase? Could you make a recommendation?

Thanks!

10

Richard,

Thanks! I don’t want to put 0, otherwise my users never be disconnected by timeout. Could you recommend me a reasonable value to be put in PingTimeout and validfrequency?

11

Richard,

I increased pingTimeout to 30s and ValidationFrequency for 38s. However, I still have seen very pingTimeouts, almost every 4 minutes. Do you think I should increase to a higher number? See this log:

http://www.localmidia.com.br/publicidade/wowzamediaserver_access.log.2013-06-11

Thanks!

12

carlos, you could try to increase the values for the PingTimeOut & ValidationFrequency settings at the bottom of /conf/VHost.xml.

Additionally if you haven’t done it yet, you could adjust the java heap size as suggested in the performance tuning, see step 3

Salvadore