Icecast Streaming Media Server

Anonymous · Guest

I'm running Icecast 2.3.1 for a group of radio stations, and am having trouble with Icecast's status.xsl page seeming to die periodically (it works one minute, and then you get a page not found -- only way to get it back is to restart the icecast process). I'm also experiencing a bandwidth bottleneck somewhere that is limiting the number of simultaneous listeners to the streams, even though the total number of listeners on the server is less than half of the maximums specified in the .xml config file. The system is a dual xeon 2.4GHz system running SuSE 9.2 Professional, connected to a 100Mb pipe to the Internet (and it is a full 100Mb pipe costing me $2000 a month). This server is hosting 12 MP3/MP3pro streams ranging from 16k to 96k in bandwidth, and nearly 2200 simultaneous users (and growing). Average throughput is around 45Mbs, before traffic seems to bottleneck. Hardware has been ruled out, as well as things on my server co-location end. Any suggestions on where to start looking at problems?

karlH · Code Warrior Joined: 13 Jun 2005 Posts: 5476 Location: UK

The error log is the place to look for failures or limits being reached. In these error cases what does icecast log.

karl.

Anonymous · Guest

Here's a snippit from the error log...

karlH · Code Warrior Joined: 13 Jun 2005 Posts: 5476 Location: UK

Do you know what your process file descriptor limit is ? The accept fails because that is being reached and it's not an icecast setting. The setting, if set, will be in /etc/security/limits.conf (nofile)

Can you also try some fixes that have been collected since the 2.3.1 release, I have a tarball at http://mediacast1.com/~karl/testing/icecast-2.3.1a.tar.gz

karl.

Anonymous · Guest

I don't know what the file descriptor limit is, unfortunately. The install is an out-of-the-box Suse 9.2 Professional load, with the usual security updates and some lockdowns to keep the script kiddies out. /etc/security/limits.conf is set at its defaults, with all lines commented out. Is there another place I should look?

I'll check out the fixes and see if any help. Thanks for your help on all of this!

karlH · Code Warrior Joined: 13 Jun 2005 Posts: 5476 Location: UK

The limits file states various limits that you want to impose, ulimit -a and ulimit -aH will show what the soft/hard limits currently are but typically the limit has been 1024 descriptors. I guess you will need to increase this limit if you want a lot more listeners to connect.

karl.

Anonymous · Guest

Check the file-max entry in proc:

Anonymous · Guest

/proc/sys/fs/file-max was set to over 200000. Trying to use /etc/security/limits.conf didn't work either at first. I ended up doing a little more googling and found an article about Oracle and the mods needed to make the Oracle dB work on Suse 9.2. Turns out you have to install the ulimits package using Yast2 in order to control anything with the ulimit command, otherwise you will get a "operation not permitted" error. Going to test this over the next week and see if there is any improvement.
Thanks again.