Wowza Community

EC2 Performance/Bandwidth

I’ve been running wowza on an EC2 small instance for about a week and it’s been great - it performed better than RTMP from CloudFront. I’ve been streaming dynamic bitrates, and typically serving the highest levels. However, today the bandwidth has dropped off dramatically. My lowest bitrate is about 500kbps, and my bandwidth today is consistently dropping below that for me. Obviously, this could be an EC2 bandwidth issue, but I’m wondering if there’s a way I can know if my instance is performing poorly. I’ve stopped and started the server a few times, to no avail. If I reboot my instance, will I lose the configuration changes I’ve made and have to reinstall the server license, etc?

Thanks.

You can restart the instance if you have a startup package that can restore all your settings. But it sounds like you’ve tried everything else.

-Ian

From past testing and customer experience, we estimate that the m1-small, large and xlarge instances get about 150, 250 and 350mbs throughput. We don’t have similar experience with the other instance types that have been added more recently.

Richard

Thanks. I believe this has to do with the allocated bandwidth on an m1.small instance. I’ve been trying out wowza on a small instance with a daily wowza server license. I have paid support at Amazon, so I also asked them to look into it. They mentioned that all instances have bandwidth allocations (larger instance types have larger allocations), and it’s possible that the neighboring instances have started consuming most of that bandwidth. I mention this just in case anyone else runs into this problem. Unfortunately, I’ve been unable to find more detailed information on specific bandwidth allocation for instance types at this point. (The only documentation I see on AWS simply mentions a bandwidth limitation for the free micro instances.) I’ve asked them for this. When I get it, I’ll post it here. Thanks for the reply Ian.