wowza / red5 performance

Question

I need to build infrastructure for video streaming service, that will be able to handle >100 live streams with average of 50 viewers, where top stream can have up to 5000 viewers. All streams will be served as multicast, not extra transcoding will be required (input and output will be h.264), no recording will be made. I'm curious how many streams can handle simple, non-proffessional server (customer be hosted in OVH) - let's say on quad core server with 32gigs of RAM??

P.S. I've tried to asked wowza, but their answer does not satisfy me (marketing stuff, nothing really useful).

Answer 1

in general the max users depend on the max hardware available. The question is also if you are using RTMP or RTMPT (over HTTP Tunneling). HTTP Tunneling seems to be a bit more ressource hungry. Red5 and Wowza both use Apache Mina internally so differences might be not so big.

We made some load testing with Red5 with around 150 and 250 people in a single conference room. There have been no issues, however the needed memory will grow constantly with each new 100 streams that will be needed to handle.

You should make sure that the server is configured in that way that the max number of open files is large enough. You might find more info about the possible effects if too small here: http://blog.thecodingmachine.com/content/solving-too-many-open-files-exception-red5-or-any-other-application

Red5 delivers also some kind of clustering build in. I don't know the current status of it, however I think you can also easily build a cluster with several nodes if you simply manage the redirect to the nodes available correctly. You just need to make sure that people that would like to connect to the same stream should be visiting the same server node.