CPU/Memory needs of DNAS with many listernes
 

Hey Everyone,

As our listener base grows, we are considering hosting our own DNAS but are curious about the physical machine requirements:

* What kind of computer is need to support a DNAS with many listeners?

* How many listerns max can one instance of the DNAS support?

* Would more listeners require another instance of the DNAS or an entirely separate machine?

* We stream at 128kbps; does that use more CPU/memory than a lower bitrate? (can't imagine that it would...but hey...gotta know...)

Ultimately, I am trying to determine at what point (ie, how many listeners: 500? 1000? 2000? 5000? 10,000?) it is more cost effective to run the streams ourselves instead of using a 3rd party host. Purchace of X number of physical servers factors into that calucation.

Advice from those who run their own streams (MegaRock, DJ Amps?, Jay?, etc?) would be very much appreciated.

Thanks so much,
rg.

well for one of my streams I have a p350 with 256megs of RAM, has done 670 listeners at peak, with a 160k stream, no problem.

I believe Shoutcast has a 1000 limitation, so if you are getting near that, just setup another, relay from the first, and then the YP will consider it a cluster :)

You could go for a seperate machine when say you reach 4000, just for resilience sake, but it wont need it because of memory or CPU.

BW

Any other thoughts? Or does everyone agree?

Thanks,
rg.

Fact is your web connection upload is going to dictate your listener numbers.
Unless you got an industrial strength connection your not going to get many people hooked up.

Stream hosting is likely your best option here.
Youll find the more listener slots you require the cheaper the hosting should be.

The RAM requirements are secondary to bandwidth -- regardless what you have, the [upload] bandwidth you have will be the limiiting factor, not the RAM or CPU power of any PC you use to serve the stream.

The DNAS is incredibly memory [RAM] and CPU efficient -- it does not take a lot of computing power to be a SHOUTcaster.

Requirements:

If you want to broadcast to listeners, you'll need:

* 90Mhz or faster server, running one of Windows 95, 98, NT, 2000, ME,
Mac OS X, Sparc Solaris 2.7+, FreeBSD 4.x+, or Linux with a libc6 kernel.

* 14kB of memory for every listener you want to broadcast to (i.e. 1,000
listeners means you need 14 Megabytes of RAM), plus whatever your
operating system needs for overhead, plus 1.5MB for the server's
base requirements. Don't set the listener count higher than you need,
it just screws things up.

* Enough bandwidth to run the server. If you want to broadcast to 100
listeners at 24kbps, you'll need about 24kbps*100 = 2,400kbps = 2.4Mbps
of bandwidth. That's about 2 T1 lines worth of bandwidth. Trying to
push 100 128kbps listeners down your 768kbps cable modem isn't going
to work :)



The yp has a limit, used to be 1000 as bored_womble said not sure what it is now. Simply setup multiple instances of the DNAS to get around this though. The other thing is what your network card can handle. Even if your connection can handle 100 Mbps your card may choke well before that.

Tom

Hey Everyone,

Thanks for your replies. In this case, bandwidth will NOT be the limiting factor. What I'm trying to figure out is how many physical servers I have to have to support 10's-of-thousands of listeners.


Thanks, Tom, I remember reading this...LONG ago. That's what I needed to know.Anyone else have other personal experience?

Thanks again,
rg.