Richard - as always, I appreciate the fast response. I was looking at Edge/Origin earlier today, but I’m not sure it’s what I originally though it would be. For instance – I have the small Wowza EC2 instance running 24/7 for a church group. They have a dozen congregations that push live streams to the servers (there is a few hours out of the weekend where many of them overlap, which is when we see the problems most). Each live stream is recorded to the content directory and is made available for VOD throughout the week (which is extremely low usage).
Leaving the server on 24/7 also allows any of the congregations to broadcast a live event (Bible Study, or Wedding, or whatever) at any time. If I choose to go the Edge/Origin configuration route I’m essentially going to have to run BOTH of those 24/7. Correct? Since the incoming live streams have to point to a “edge1.website.com” server or an “edge2.website.com” server (if I have multiple edges) it means that I can not shut the edge servers off whenever I want (to save money) – because if I shut those off during the week, the congregations who are set for “edge1” or “edge2” webcasts will not be able to webcast until they notify me and ask for me to launch an edge server again. Is that correct? or am I totally off base here.
One more note: I just looked at CACTI on my “problem” instance… and the Localhost - Memory Usage graph (under “system”) shows just a hair-line of “Free”, with most of the graph showing “Swap” Memory Usage. This doesn’t seem right to me. I launched another EC2 instance and saw pretty much the reverse (it was mostly “Free” Memory Usage with only a small bit listed as “Swap”). That small instance only has a GIG of memory… so does this sound like a problem?
Also, back to the CACTI graph… the “problem” instance never seems to run below 0.49 for the Localhost - Load Average. And this is with NOTHING happening – no streams going to or coming from the server. The “new” instance I launched showed an average of .08 for the Load Average – and that’s when I was pushing a 350kbps stream to it and also watching it in Flash as well as an iPad.
There has to be something wrong with the “problem” instance – so I’m going t start the long process of downloading everything from it and uploading it to this new instance to see if things improve. The only real pain to doing this will be manually rebuilding all the CACTI user accounts and graphics. BLAH!
I’ll report my findings if things improve. I sure hope they do.
Let me know if my Edge/Origin assumptions are correct! Thanks!!