Icecast - Mar 2024 - Education - 1, 000s, 100, 000's, Millions of listeners. (What kind of infrastructure)

Hello everyone.

This is something I am interested in learning more about.
Let's say you have an audience of (what is in the subject line.)
What kind of infrastructure do you need for Icecast?

I asked a similar question about the liquidsoap group.

In Windows and Linux web servers, we can create a forest for our web servers.
Send traffic to different servers to even the workload.

Can we do something like this with the Icecast servers?
(or)
Will we have to install new VMs, add the heavy stations on that one,
and send the new traffic there?

Thanks for any discussion on this.
Wayne

Good morning,

On Wed, 2024-03-20 at 13:16 -0400, Wayne Barron wrote:
> Hello everyone.
> 
> This is something I am interested in learning more about.
> Let's say you have an audience of (what is in the subject line.)
> What kind of infrastructure do you need for Icecast?
> 
> I asked a similar question about the liquidsoap group.
> 
> In Windows and Linux web servers, we can create a forest for our web
> servers. Send traffic to different servers to even the workload.
> 
> Can we do something like this with the Icecast servers?
> (or)
> Will we have to install new VMs, add the heavy stations on that one,
> and send the new traffic there?
Generally you can just run any number of servers in a cluster. Often
with a single or double layer master-slave setup (to also add
redundancy on the source side).


Most of the time the network is the bottle neck. For example for 10k
listeners at 112kbit/s you need something between 1.5Gbit/s and
2.5Gbit/s of network connectivity.

You also want to take into account that at times you want to maintain
your cluster. Or you might also be hit by some bad luck and some part
of your cluster goes down.

You may also want to spread your load geographically.

It's not magic but there is a bit to consider.


A while ago we actually had two presentations on this topic. One on
small setups with less than 30k simultaneous listeners and one for
setups with more.

If there is interest from a few people I would be happy to host an open
discussion or something.

Hope that helps to give you an initial overview.

With best regards,


-- 
Philipp Schafft (CEO/Gesch?ftsf?hrer)
Telephone:???????????+49.3535 490 17 92
Website:?????????????https://www.loewenfelsen.net/
Follow us:???????????https://www.linkedin.com/company/loewenfelsen/
Gesch?ftsf?hrer/CEO: Philipp Schafft

L?wenfelsen UG (haftungsbeschr?nkt)?????Registration number:
Bickinger Stra?e 21?????????????????????HRB 12308 CB
04916 Herzberg (Elster)?????????????????VATIN/USt-ID:
Germany?????????????????????????????????DE305133015

On Mar 20, 2024, at 13:16, Wayne Barron <wayne at cffcs.com> wrote:
> In Windows and Linux web servers, we can create a forest for our web
servers.
> Send traffic to different servers to even the workload.
> 
> Can we do something like this with the Icecast servers?
> (or)
> Will we have to install new VMs, add the heavy stations on that one,
> and send the new traffic there?
Ok, I?m going to be ?that guy??

I would argue that, as soon as you?ve hit an audience size of 10,000 or more
(especially if that audience is at all geographically dispersed), IceCast is
basically off the table. The reason why can be summarized in three letters:
?CDN? [Content Distribution Networks].

To fan out to large, geographically dispersed audiences of 10,000 or more (not
to mention 100k?s or, Lord help us, 1M?s or more), you need to get content
cached in locations that are geographically close to your listeners. By far the
easiest (read: most cost effective) way to do this at scale is to leverage the
already existing infrastructure of CDNs (companies like Akamai or CloudFlare,
that have a world-wide footprint). That means using streaming formats that
utilize segmented distribution mechanisms, such as HLS or DASH. You can
kinda-sorta do this sort of thing with IceCast by using relays, but it?s complex
to configure and monitor while being not well supported at many CDNs (Akamai for
example discontinued their IceCast product offering several years ago). HLS OTOH
plays very well with that infrastructure because it?s effectively just a bunch
of static files that get replicated via HTTP[S]. No special ?server? software is
required; bog-standard Apache or Nginx work just fine, because the complex
?media handling? bits have been intentionally pushed to the endpoints; namely
the encoder and (especially) the players. Today though, when FOSS HLS audio
encoders are available and pretty much every browser supports playing HLS
content natively, the complexity angle can be largely ignored by content
creators.

Just my take. That, and 2 ? will get you a (cheap) cup of coffee?

Cheers!


|---------------------------------------------------------------------|
| Frederick F. Gleason, Jr. |             Chief Developer             |
|                           |             Paravel Systems             |
|---------------------------------------------------------------------|
|    All progress is based upon a universal innate desire of every    |
|    organism to live beyond its income.                              |
|                                                                     |
|                                                  -- Samuel Butler   |
|                                                  "Notebooks"       
|
|---------------------------------------------------------------------|

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL:
<http://lists.xiph.org/pipermail/icecast/attachments/20240320/94638559/attachment.htm>