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Anonymous
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 Posted: Wed Dec 05, 2007 11:58 pm Post subject: Icecast2 stream drops in iTunes, buffers often in WMP |
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Hi guys
I am running a university student radio station called "Burst Radio" at the University of Bristol in the UK.
We are running Icecast2 on Ubuntu linux with DarkIce plugged in to Jack on our web streaming server, and it is connected to the internet via JANET which (supposedly) is a very good connection.
Our server is available on the internet at:
http://137.222.136.150:8000
Our listeners and I have noticed that we are having issues with our web stream. In iTunes, the stream loads fine to begin with but then regularly drops, requiring the user to manually re-load the stream. In Windows Media, it plays better, usually with no problems although it does sometimes stop for buffering.
My question is this. Firstly, why is it dropping so often in itunes and is there anything we can do on the software/configuration side to help reduce this.
Secondly, I am not quite sure what specs our server is, but we are usually only broadcasting to a max of 25 listeners, if that. (that's on a good day). But the stream seems to drop regardless of how many people are connected. Do you think the hardware may have something to do with it? What specs do you run on your Icecast server? We might be able to upgrade ours but I am not sure what to upgrade to solve this problem!
A print out from the top command in the shell on the server is:
| Code: |
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
4315 root 16 0 7028 7028 4416 S 24.8 1.6 9742:12 rotter
4227 root -99 0 27196 26m 6612 S 15.4 6.0 4793:14 darkice
3964 root 19 0 22884 22m 4912 S 3.5 5.1 670:32.94 jackd
5082 root 15 0 2708 1388 800 R 2.5 0.3 0:06.42 top
4141 root -9 0 40524 39m 21m S 1.6 9.0 954:52.85 caed
4046 mysql 15 0 128m 17m 5884 S 0.3 4.0 39:02.15 mysqld
1 root 15 0 2824 1884 584 S 0.0 0.4 0:02.13 init
2 root RT 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 migration/0
3 root 34 19 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 ksoftirqd/0
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(we are running rotter to record all output).
We have tried increasing the buffer size to no avail. I get the same problem with dropped streams in our studio network which is 100MB/sec as outside, although it's worse outside, so am quite sure bandwidth is not the (only?) problem.
Finally, I have heard that UDP streaming is less processor intensive that TCP. Does Icecast support this and would it help?
Any advice is much appreciated
Thanks
Will
www.burstradio.org.uk |
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karlH
Code Warrior
Joined: 13 Jun 2005
Posts: 5476
Location: UK
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| Posted: Thu Dec 06, 2007 12:47 am Post subject: |
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You asked several questions so lets separate them
1. check the icecast error log for times when those Itunes drop, see if icecast dropped them or whether they closed the connection at their end. If Itunes drops the connection then there really anything we can do accept recommend another/better player. If you see messages about a client too far behind then it maybe a network stall, if so try increasing the queue size as the default we ship with is ~500k.
2. icecast itself is not a big CPU resource, however if other tasks on the same system starve icecast then you can get problems. You can use utils like top/vmstat etc to see if the snapshots show much activity.
3. icecast does not handle the UDP protocol. TCP is heavier but you won't notice it on a load you are talking about.
karl. |
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