Hi,
I need to use Wowza to stream videos. I expect to have between 20,000 and 50,000 watches in the same time. What hardware specs should I choose?
I checked https://www.wowza.com/products/streaming-engine/specifications but I don’t know which option should I choose (Minimum or High-load or some thing in between)?
Best Regards,
Hello,
When discussing server capacity, the main bottleneck usually is the internet bandwidth available for your server. In addition to se server bandwidth, you will need to consider the encoding bitrate of the stream you are going to publish to your server. Having this in mind, in order to calculate the number of users a server setup can handle, you can use the following formula:
number of users * stream bitrate + 15% IP overhead = total server bandwidth
In order to increase the capacity of your streaming platform, you can use multiple Wowza servers running behind a Load Balancer. To implement this, you can use the Dynamic Load Balancing AddOn.
In addition to this, depending on the content you are delivering you can different server configurations:
For Live streaming, you can setup an Origin/Edge server configuration as described in the “How to configure a live stream repeater”. In this scenario, you can have one Wowza Origin server, which will distribute the live stream to your multiple Edge servers. The Edge servers will then deliver the live stream to your streaming clients.
For VOD streaming, you can use multiple Wowza server, all having the same VOD content replicated, or you can setup a centralised VOD storage server, and have each Wowza Edge server use the Media Cache functionality to retrieve a particular VOD file and then deliver it to the requesting streaming client. Please take a look at he “How to scale video on demand streaming with Media Cache” forum article describing how to properly configure Wowza and Media Cache for this delivery workflow.
Zoran