Icecast - Nov 2001 - how many streams can icecast handle ?

hi everyone

For my diploma work on streaming music, I'm looking into 
cost of handling a large amount of users.

Somehow I couldnt find some experience on the net about 
how many concurrent streams a single box could handle 
using icecast (without encoding, just the streaming 
of pre-encoded mp3-files).

Does anybody have some experience that I could include 
as a reference point ?

Thanks !

Andrew

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The simple answer is:  way more than your Internet connection will support
:-)

The server consumes very little in the way of resources. Your outgoing
bandwidth will almost certainly be the limiting factor. Just divide your
available bandwidth by the bitrate of your stream (& lop off about 5% of
that number for overhead & a safety margin) .

Example:  a T1 line = 1.54 mbps = 1540 kbps / 24kbps (stream bitrate) = 64
streams

So a T-1 line can support 64 24kbps streams (in theory). In practice, about
60

-bg
> hi everyone
>
> For my diploma work on streaming music, I'm looking into
> cost of handling a large amount of users.
>
> Somehow I couldnt find some experience on the net about
> how many concurrent streams a single box could handle
> using icecast (without encoding, just the streaming
> of pre-encoded mp3-files).
>
> Does anybody have some experience that I could include
> as a reference point ?
>
> Thanks !
>
> Andrew
>
> --- >8 ----
> List archives:  http://www.xiph.org/archives/
> icecast project homepage: http://www.icecast.org/
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'icecast-request at xiph.org'
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needed.
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Thanks Bill !

I see ;-) soo cpu power is not the bottleneck - but available bandwidth is.

ok here's one scenario:

lets say my provider here in Switzerland would connect me to
his hosting center, which has the following bandwidths:

- 155 Mbit ATM Network internally
  (so anyone logging on to the provider directly is not the problem,
   there should be enough bandwidth)

- Peerings to other ISP's of - as he writes - 200 MBit
  -> so this should be enough for, let's say, 2000 streams

Could one single machine handle that ? Or is my calculation at all wrong ?

thanks, the information is most appreciated, as it's just 2 weeks
until I have to hand in my diploma work ;-)

best regrads

andrew
> -----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
> Von: owner-icecast@xiph.org [mailto:owner-icecast@xiph.org]Im Auftrag
> von William Goldsmith
> Gesendet: Sonntag, 4. November 2001 17:35
> An: icecast@xiph.org
> Betreff: Re: [icecast] how many streams can icecast handle ?
>
>
> The simple answer is:  way more than your Internet connection
> will support
> :-)
>
> The server consumes very little in the way of resources. Your outgoing
> bandwidth will almost certainly be the limiting factor. Just
> divide your
> available bandwidth by the bitrate of your stream (& lop off
> about 5% of
> that number for overhead & a safety margin) .
>
> Example:  a T1 line = 1.54 mbps = 1540 kbps / 24kbps (stream
> bitrate) = 64
> streams
>
> So a T-1 line can support 64 24kbps streams (in theory). In
> practice, about
> 60
>
> -bg
>
>
> > hi everyone
> >
> > For my diploma work on streaming music, I'm looking into
> > cost of handling a large amount of users.
> >
> > Somehow I couldnt find some experience on the net about
> > how many concurrent streams a single box could handle
> > using icecast (without encoding, just the streaming
> > of pre-encoded mp3-files).
> >
> > Does anybody have some experience that I could include
> > as a reference point ?
> >
> > Thanks !
> >
> > Andrew
> >
> > --- >8 ----
> > List archives:  http://www.xiph.org/archives/
> > icecast project homepage: http://www.icecast.org/
> > To unsubscribe from this list, send a message to
> 'icecast-request@xiph.org'
> > containing only the word 'unsubscribe' in the body.  No
> subject is needed.
> > Unsubscribe messages sent to the list will be ignored/filtered.
>
>
> --- >8 ----
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> icecast project homepage: http://www.icecast.org/
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> subject is needed.
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>
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Hey all,

I'm running an icecast server (latest version) and providing streams to it
via ices (latest version).

Myself and many others have no trouble whatsoever connecting to the streams
and listening indefinitely. There are a good number of people that have
tried and tried to connect but either get constant drops and/or cannot
connect at all.

The only thing I could attribute it to was the possible problems with
streaming the meta data. At first I had "use_meta_data 1" in the
icecast
config, changed it to "use_meta_data 0" to some good effect I believe
as at
least one person said his problem ceased immediately after that. At some
point I just removed the "use_meta_data" line entirely. I'm not
entirely
sure how to ensure no meta data whatsoever is used. At this point clients
still receive the station name, the URL and the song title (actually just
the file name I believe-though at times it still seems to pick up additional
information).

I wouldn't be surprised if some of the connecting people are just clueless.
You'll have that, but some of them I know personally and have been giving
them all sorts of things to try in order to connect.

The people that I trust for valid feedback are able to connect to several
other streaming mp3 stations (not hosted on my machine) and use a variety of
clients (winamp/itunes/etc.).

I didn't see a way to disable throttling so I cranked it up beyond that of
my actual bandwidth. I have plenty of unused bandwidth. That should not be
an issue (and the people that can connect never have drops or any issues).

Any particular information I should be collecting from the clients having
the issues and/or anything that strikes anyone right off about any server
config issues I may be having? Happy to provide additional details if
needed.

Thanks,
Mike

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