Wowza Community

To handle 10,000 concurrent users

Guys / Gals

Just asking, what kind of wowza setup / network infra should I have if I want to be able handle 10,000 concurrent users using Wowza2 ?

Say a stream is 200kbps audio/video H264 encoding.

What are you planning to do: Live and/or video on demand?

Richard

I don’t think so. My test server with vod instance can serve only 600 concurrent users with 480 kbps video.

If wowza could provide the rtmfp/p2p feature, it should be able to serve 10,000 concurrent users.

Hi guys,

10,000 users watching VOD is a fairly large number of simultaneous customers for most (general content) providers, but it can be done using current technology. It will mean investing in the right network connections and building a well architected and tested configuration. No p2p is required so you can continue to maintain control of both your content and your viewer (not to mention that you won’t have to worry about anyone blocking/denying your attempts to send over a p2p link).

For example, we have data from a (dated) configuration posted in our FAQ showing that with just 2 cores, 2 GB of RAM, 2 data hard drives, and a 1 GbitE connection, we were able to use 400 randomly selected files to establish 700 connections:

Of course, we would suggest gathering data for your customer’s actual usage patterns to ensure that you’re designing a solution to address the problem you have.

Just get a modern dedicated server, a good storage I/O subsystem, and a top tier network connection. Then follow the general performance tuning instructions :

and use our testing tool liberally (the tool is available by sending email to test[at]wowza.com).

Watch your I/O patterns closely- if your working set of VOD files is very large, you may need to invest in either software which provides storage device caching (according to tests at Oracle’s Sun benchmark labs, their ZFS will provide useful caching of data in RAM). We have other customers who simply bought a pool of SSD units large enough to hold their working set of files. Storage tuning is required because the workloads faced by any storage product have traditionally been way too widely varying to ensure high end out-of-box performance.

If you need further guidance in tuning, I’ve found that most of the top-tier hardware vendors have benchmarking labs and competency centers where they have staff who are more than happy to ensure that you’re getting maximum performance out of their gear. That being said, they will need you to setup the load testing tool in advance to provide data gathered of your most intense I/O access pattern (since running a video server looks quite different from running a database).

If you need an introduction to the HW vendors, just send an email to sales[at]wowzamedia[dot]com (include the contact info for your current sales team contact at that vendor to ensure your inquiry gets tracked & escalated).

Hope this helps.

Yours,

John West

…one more item,

If you’re going to setup a multi-server, tiered storage architecture, you’ll want to send an email to sales-at-wowzamedia-dot-com for a couple other pointers and downloads.

-John

you could do some form of load balancing, but you would be looking at 15-20 servers…

That is a lot of viewers!

I have a custom base of around 1500, and only ever get around 300 at any 1 given time on a stream… so are you sure your figures are correct?