Icecast Streaming Media Server

[Anonymous]

Here's our problem:

We have Icecast 2.3.1 running on a new HP PC sitting in the equipment closet at an ISP. A darkice client in the same office is sending a 64k and a 22k stream to the Icecast server.

Everything works perfectly for weeks at a time when only a few users are receiving streams. But when more than about 10 people connect to the Icecast server (most listen to the 64k stream), the Icecast server appears to bog down such that it starts refusing the Darkice source stream, resulting in an intermittent broadcast and buffer overrun errors in the Darkice client. When users drop below about 8, the problems disappear.

Are we missing something in our Icecast configuration? We're pretty sure the Darkice box is set up properly, and the office network itself is good.

[Anonymous]

Both machines (darkice and icecast) are running SuSE 10.0, with nothing else running on them.

[karlH]

Can you explain what you mean by 'bog down', are you talking about excessive CPU usage?. Darkice, being a source client, doesn't know about listeners connected so that should stay fairly constant, no matter how many listeners are connected. Check the error log for indicators but it could something as simple as <clients> not being high enough.

karl

[Anonymous]

what I mean is that the Icecast broadcast is smooth and interrupted when the number of listeners is under 8 or so. As clients grows beyond that, it appears that Icecast is unable to keep up with the incoming source stream from the Darkice machine and starts dropping the source stream packets. The broadcast starts to be interrupted by periods of silence. It's as if the incoming connection has a very low priority.

We have clients set at the default of 100 (and sorry, I misspoke--we're using 2.3.0, not 2.3.1). Our peak during a recent broadcast was 81 clients. You can listen at http://209.169.14.130:8000/sfc64.m3u.

thanks.

[karlH]

It sounds like is you have reached a bandwidth limit, you're sure your upload limit from icecast is fine for over those 8 listeners ? The stalling playback is the sort of thing that would happen in such cases.

karl.