I’m using wowza for HLS streaming and was comparing its performance versus using an HTTP Server (IIS). I have Wowza and IIS setup on the same box. I encoded a video into 6 bit rates using Compressor’s default settings for HLS, and I had it also segment those videos out. I uploaded everything into a single folder and pointed IIS and Wowza at it. They both play really great, but when playing the video via IIS it starts and seeks way faster than from Wowza. At first I thought this might be due to the fact that Wowza has to create the manifest files and segments on-the-fly, but that’s not the issue. When I watch the HTTP traffic, the segments are downloaded significantly quicker from IIS than from Wowza. Is that to be expected? Or is there some type of throttling going on in wowza that I can control?
The pre generated segments being served by IIS are about 6.2MB each. They get delivered in roughly 1.8 seconds.
The segments served by wowza are about 5.6MB each. They get delivered in roughly 3 seconds.
I would think that wowza should be able to read and output the data as quickly as a web server. Also, I do understand that wowza is doing a lot more work than the webserver in that it needs to seek to the correct spot to create the segment, but that doesn’t seem to be the issue. The actual download is just slower…
Thoughts?