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A
Anonymous
July 29, 2008
Question

FMS bandwidth requirement

  • July 29, 2008
  • 1 reply
  • 1039 views
We're trying to work out some bandwith requirements for a product we have produced.

We have high quality streaming flv files streaming from FMS2.

The flv files are encoded to 900kb/s and audio 80kb/s

Does this strictly mean that clients viewing the videos actually do use 980kb/s bandwidth when they stream this video file?

Is there any way of determining how much bandwidth a 900kb/s encoded video file will actually use when streamed?

We have data which tells us approximately how many users might use the product simultaneously and I need to work out what bandwidth is required for peak time usage. So, if there are likely to be 100 simultaneous users, does this mean we require a bandwidth of 100 * 980kb/s ? That seems a bit wrong to me and I wonder if there's an established or better way of calculating it.

Any info would be gratefully received.

Thanks in advance.
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    1 reply

    A
    Anonymous
    July 29, 2008
    The actual network bandwidth consume by FMS as well as the client will be a bit more (my guess is 10-20% for videos streams)due to various protocol headers. Bad quality network connection at a flash client may also increase the bandwidth usage on FMS for that client by a small value due to TCP resends.
    The best way to know the actual consumption is to monitor it over network card using network analyzer.
    One good way would be to observe out the actual network usage for one client watching the exactly same video and then multiply this value with 100 to predict the network usage for 100 simultaneous users.

    K
    kmode
    Participant
    October 12, 2008
    smon_ed, you pose a good question.

    I have tested encoding FLV files (in High-quality 800kb's VP6) and have run 5-6 simultaneous streams in FMS.

    Here are some calculations I've done to get a feel for how much bandwidth running 10-20 streams at first and then running thousands of streams later will take using FMS.


    800kb/s VP6 video:

    In FMS under View Applications >Performance, 1 stream averages about 100,000 bytes per second. which comes to 781 kilobits.

    4 streams in FMS average about 250,000 bytes per second which comes to about 1.95 Megabits

    8 streams in FMS average about 560,000 bytes per second which comes to about 4.27 Megabits

    (all calculations verified with Google calculator)

    On another note, in Manage Servers > Connections the "Mbits In / Out" Column doesn't seem to give a real-time bandwidth output. It just ADDS bandwidth as the server runs??? When you close the client-connection (stream) the value remains and doesn't reset to zero. I can understand the need for a Log so that you don't end up paying your ISP for 10GB / month! but how about a LIVE VIEW for your server's current output???

    AND under Manage Servers > Applications the Mbits Out Column does not reset either. It also adds bandwidth to each server.

    Adobe, is this on purpose? (the values not resetting to zero for "real-time" Mbits Out information?

    Bandwidth is a very important issue these days for everyone but especially for developers streaming video all over the web. Delivering a high-quality experience is certainly demanding on servers but in the end you need to have a very good Uplink to your ISP.

    Good luck everyone!

    Regards,

    "K"


    A
    Anonymous
    October 13, 2008
    Thanks for the replies. It's definitely quite a difficult thing to work out and I'm surprised that the console doesn't really supply any of that information very successfully. That is, of course, unless there's something obvious that we're missing. But then, the documentation for this product is a little poor, in my opinion so that wouldn't surprise me. (Being someone who isn't familiar with server technology at all, I've found it a real struggle getting to grips with alot of things to do with FMS2).

    Anyway... thanks again for the replies. I do now have some rough idea about bandwidth requirements thanks to your replies.

    Simon.
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