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Optimal hardware setup

 
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radiocampus



Joined: 12 Nov 2010
Posts: 10
Location: Örebro

PostPosted: Fri Sep 20, 2013 10:51 am    Post subject: Optimal hardware setup Reply with quote

Hi

We have had troublesome issues at Radio Campus Orebro for some time ... the server is crashing!

There is heavy troubleshooting ahead to come up with the reason. But it was anyway an old computer in need of replacement.

What to replace it with? What is the optimal hardware solution for running a small-scale web radio server?

( I would go for anything but I am interested to hear what you geeks out there think )
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karlH
Code Warrior
Code Warrior


Joined: 13 Jun 2005
Posts: 5476
Location: UK

PostPosted: Sat Sep 21, 2013 12:31 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Practically any recent cpu/disk combo is plenty for any small scale icecast set up these days. The question is what else you want to have running (any big task like DBs or java).

icecast is primarily I/O bound, the CPU and memory limits are only a possible concern if you are running very high numbers of streams or listeners (read 1000s). Obviously if there are any other tasks running then you need to assess the load they require as well.

As for crashes, you would need to look for a pattern, a hardware fault for example will often (but not always) effect random processes even the OS showing as application crashes or system 'panics'.

karl.
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radiocampus



Joined: 12 Nov 2010
Posts: 10
Location: Örebro

PostPosted: Tue Sep 24, 2013 9:38 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Ok, good to know!

There are pretty much no other tasks running for the moment ..

But I have plans of installing Airtime aswell: would like to have one stream comming from the mixerboard and one stream comming from a local music archive. But I haven't yet got it working properly ..

A sound card of descent quality would be something to put money on?

About the crashes, it happens to the current server, as well as the old one, so I am starting to think there is some kind of electrical fault .. will get the university Technical Support on the case.

Elias
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Nonapeptide



Joined: 08 Sep 2012
Posts: 40
Location: Scottsdale, Arizona

PostPosted: Fri Oct 25, 2013 5:19 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

radiocampus wrote:
But I have plans of installing Airtime aswell: would like to have one stream comming from the mixerboard and one stream comming from a local music archive. But I haven't yet got it working properly ..

My experience with a couple thousand listeners is that IceCast uses almost imperceptible amounts of CPU and RAM. How many simultaneous listeners are you seeing and expecting? I wouldn't recommend this, but just know that's it's possible to stream to thousands of people with virtually any desktop PC's hardware. Don't use that as a reason to skimp, but still... CPU and RAM isn't going to be your bottleneck in my experience.

The network connection is almost always the first limit you're going to bump into. If you're streaming 128k audio, you'll be able to handle a little over 8,000 listeners on a gigabit network connection, assuming that you have the full amount of throughput on the network (unlikely). In fact, the OS's handling of saturating a Gbit NIC will consume more CPU than IceCast itself in my experience.


radiocampus wrote:
A sound card of descent quality would be something to put money on?

A sound card only comes in to play on the source of the audio, and if your audio source is also your IceCast server, then it could be worth it if you want impeccable audio. Normally it's find to simply use an audio player to play the source files and then feed them into an encoder which itself re-encodes (a little nasty, but as long as your source files are very high bitrate, it's okay).

This also brings up the topic of CPU and encoders. Since it sounds like you're going to be encoding audio on the same server that IceCast is running on, that will most certainly consume the most CPU. For example, I most often encode MP3 and Vorbis (Hopefully soon moving to AAC+ and Vorbis) and both encoders running at the same time will take up maybe 20% of a CPU in a lower end desktop PC. It's no big deal for me because I never encode source audio on the IceCast server, but in your case it might need to be part of the equation since everything will be running on one PC.
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