Icecast Streaming Media Server

[Anonymous]

Whats the odds / equipment needed to setup a station for 250,000 listeners max?

This is a serious question too, and yes, I am a geeky techy, so fire on the jargon, I have something like 24 hours to produce a plan, thing is, im on my laptop atm, and not in a good state of mind to think, so anyone want to give me a quick start?

Im guessing a monster of a machine (server) and a garage load of slave servers?

Regards

Danny

[karlH]

The max number of listeners is limited by bandwidth available. For our published tests we used 14,000 listeners on a single server and it didn't max out the CPU. So yes a series of slaves is what you'll need to achieve the sort of capacity you mentioned, how many will depend on the stream bandwidth and network capacity.
You don't need a monster CPU or SMP for icecast, but they can be useful if you have many streams running at the same time.

karl.

[Anonymous]

This is an interesting hypothetical ... basically it's all about bandwidth.

Icecast has already done some hardware scaling tests at:
http://www.icecast.org/loadtest.php

.. where they showed that a 3ghz Dell rack pretty much could handled 14k listeners without really breaking a sweat, and could take more. The problem is delivering X amount of bandwidth per machine. Thats's where it gets expensive.

You haven't mentioned the bitrates or formats you want to stream at, but there's a very basic equation re: how much bandwidth you would need for X listeners at Y connection speed. I assume these machines would be colocated somewhere, and a 1gig backbone connection ain't cheap ... take that times however many machines you'd need.

Actually, there's a nice bandwidth calculator here: http://mediacast1.com/calculator.php?list=calc_bwneeds

Also, for redundancy's sake, I'm guessing you'd want multiple datacenters in case one goes down and for geographic and network redundancy, so consider the following:

If 1 rack = 20k listeners... for a quarter mil. you'd need twelve or thirteen racks. Take four each and stick them in 4 different datacenters: LA, Dallas, Chicago, NYC, etc. Stick 4 more overseas if you need to serve that market...

You could also just farm it out to someone who already has this infrastructure, i.e. media hosting house, which saves you the hardware costs. But you're paying for bandwidth. And a quarter mil listeners == a hell of a lot of bandwidth.

[Anonymous]

Interesting replies, I was aware of the amount of concurrent bandwidth required, now its just a case of working out the exact technical map, before sitting down and working out finances.

Check back in a couple of days, when I get time to do all this and update.

[Anonymous]

What I forgot to mention, which might be obvious, is the four 'broadcasting' datacenters could just be setup to load-balance: either via dns round robin, or catch listeners when they show up on the site and control which ones they connect to, i.e. sense the one with the lowest load, or whichever one is a closer network hop to the listener.

I'll bite, though, I want to know what kind of market/station is expecting 250k simultaneous listeners