[icecast] load average question

Karl Heyes
Fri, 06 Aug 2004 14:23:38 -0000

On Fri, 2003-12-05 at 19:12, Adon Irani wrote:
> i realize this isn't the correct list for this , so i won't ask
(again )
> , but i've looked into my server load further .. and have attached a
top
> output
>
> i am almost out of free memory . i would expect this would be a priority
> .. but will it make a difference in CPU usage ?

no, in general free memory is bad, it's unused, but a small amount
unused is ok as that means some pages can be allocated without stalling.
Note that you have 48Meg in page cache which can be easily reclaimed by
apps.

> and my CPU usage is near 1oo% . .. this is due to 2 streamTranscoder runs
> . .. for now , i want to do this -- (unless there's a better way to
play
> mp3 streams from ogg file , is ices 0.3 any better optimized for playlist
> , i could simply use streamTranscoder on live runs ) .

I don't know the internals of streamTranscoder to comment, but you are
decoding then encoding the stream.

> if i am running an AMD 7oo Duron , how much of an upgrade would you think
> is needed to handle this load ?

It depends on the number of streams and there encoder settings,
samplerate is a big factor for instance.  Also whats the minimum spec
you can get these days :)

>  -- [ i have two channels running, and have renamed the binaries with 1 or
> 2 appended so that i can track them through ps , ( i don't know how to
> track actual PID's .. again, any suggestions here would be appreciated
) ]

I think I'll be adding the pidfile tag to ices2 as well as it has its
uses.

karl.