Hi,
The Wowza Streaming Engine software creates the chunks on the fly using the on-demand content so it doesn’t need to cache the data in memory as it’s already instantly available.
The MediaCache functionality will get the data from the MediaCache Source (in this case S3) in segments which are cached on the machine where the Wowza Streaming Engine software is installed but they’re written to disk and not stored in memory.
The MediaCache functionality allows a large about of files to be available while using fast disk(s) or SSD(s) on the Wowza Streaming Engine side to deliver this content to your viewers without filling them as only the content that’s been recently viewed will be cached.
Regards,
Jason Hilton
Technical Support Engineer
Wowza Media Systems