Server configuration and backend technology of sites like ustream.tv

Question

I am going to build a site like ustream.tv. The main use case is A user will create a live channel and any other user can view that channel. After doing some google search I found this is done using flash media server.

I thought If I could do some load testing I could find how much hardware resource I need. Also a stress testing session will show me the breaking point of my server. But the trial version supports few parallel rtmp connections. So the testing will not work here. So I was looking for configuration of servers that runs ustream.tv. So I have these questions

1. What type of server is used in live streaming sites? CPU, RAM?
2. To balance the bandwidth does it use multiple NICs or any other technique?
3. Do I really need Flash Media Server? or there are other alternatives?

Answer 1

You can find list of commercial and non-commercial media servers here

I was working with few media servers and i suggest you to take a look some of open source solutions like:

1. Red5 - open source Java media server
2. IceCast - open source solution as well
3. FFServer - part of the Ffmpeg package ( open source solution as well )
4. Wowza - non free Java media server
5. CDN solution - CDN company (level3 for example) handle everything connected to media servers , you only need to do encoding. Price is aprox. 0.03€ per Mb

Except media servers you also need encoders that will encode and serve content to the media servers. Some of them are:

1. Flash Media Live Encoder - it is free solution from Adobe
2. ffmpeg - open source solution ( i have had lots of problems with it when i was trying to encode with it for live streaming )
3. Media excel - commercial solution

Server

I can't tell you exactly what server you should use.

It depends on lots of things such as:

1) Do you plan to serve live content
2) Do you plan to serve non-live content
3) Will you have multi bitrate support (users with higher bandwith will have better picture quality)

For my persional experiece i can tell that HP Proliant DL 380 G7 (Intel® Xeon® X5650, 6 core, 2.66 GHz, 12MB L3, 95W, with 8GB of RAM) can serve between 3000-4000 users, with multi bitrate support.

Network adapters

Again it depends what hosting company can give you and for what price (dedicated link , shared link , etc..) Antoher problem that rises here, multiple adapters in one machine is single point of failure by definition :)

As you probably figured out till now that you will need more than one server for video streaming. My choice would be ( as cheepest and most cleanest solution ) :

1) encoder - Flash Media Live Encoder
2) Media server - CDN solution ( they have more lots of Media server availabe )

Hope this helps!