Wowza Community

CPU Utilization Different between BYOL and Hourly AMIs?

I have a Wowza server that ingests video streams and restreams them as adaptive bitrate HLS, transcoding accordingly. I am transcoding to 720p, 360p, 160p, and aac. On my m3.large instance running the BYOL AMI (Wowza 4.3.0.01, JDK 1.8.0_40), I can restream one such video stream and still have enough system resources to restream an audio only stream.

If I try to restream more than one of these video streams, they both start stuttering and buffering. Since my video streams are only running a relatively small part of the time, rather than paying double to spin up another monthly server, I wanted to try using the hourly AMI (Wowza 4.6.0, JRE 1.8.0_77) on an m4.large. But after starting up just one stream, transcoding as I was before, the CPU is saturated and the outgoing stream stutters and buffers badly.

I even tried moving the hourly instance to an m4.xlarge and while the CPU usage now hovers right around 100% with just one stream running, the output is not any noticeably better.

The only differences I can think of in these setups:

  • Versions of Wowza
  • Versions of Java
  • License types

Has anyone else run into this and can shed some light?