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Whackie211
Known Participant
October 24, 2008
Question

FMS Performance (improvements?)

  • October 24, 2008
  • 5 replies
  • 5959 views
I'm currently running Flash Media Server 3 on a Windows 2003 Server machine with a Quad-Core Intel Xeon 2.0GHz processor and 8GB of ram. On average, the site is streaming between 250 and 415 concurrent FLV streams at any given time (according to the FMS Admin Console). The site itself averages about 1.6M pageviews per month.

The problem that I'm seeing is that at times, regardless of the traffic load, the videos will take a very long time to initially load and start up and then buffer quite a bit and be very slow to seek within the timeline. We use the the JW FLV Media Player ( http://www.jeroenwijering.com/?item=JW_FLV_Player) but I don't think it has anything to do with the player itself.

Are there any performance tweaks and/or settings or anything else you can think of to improve the serving of the FLV files via FMS?

I monitor the server's performance all the time and it never appears to be under much stress. On average the FMSCore.exe process consumes 737MB of ram and 2% of the CPU. The CPU's performance overall only fluctuates between 3 and 18%. Does FMS even take advantage of the multiple cores in a Quad-Core processor like this one?

For reference and testing purposes, here are links to a sample FLV with a play length of 4m19s and file size of 16.3MB (I apologize in advance if anyone is offended by the nature of the site and videos):

Video Page
http://www.whackmaterial.com/material.asp?id=23725

Video Page with Flash Player ONLY
http://www.whackmaterial.com/_material.asp?id=23725

Direct Link to FLV file
http://www.whackmaterial.com/material/video/23725_1.flv

Any help, suggestions, etc is greatly appreciated!
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      5 replies

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      Whackie211Author
      Known Participant
      November 18, 2008
      That's great to hear. Too bad that doesn't resolve my issue since we're running FMS on Windows 2003 :(
      W
      Whackie211Author
      Known Participant
      November 12, 2008
      Thanks for your response, Asa! I have just sent you an e-mail with the DMP files and build number.
      A
      Anonymous
      November 17, 2008
      Hi, are there any advances with this issue ? I experience "Core (32353) is no longer active" on linux, too, and this is happening about twice a day...
      A
      Anonymous
      November 18, 2008
      I think, my crashing of the core was due to a missing libasneu.so.1. link. I found that with "ldd fmsmaster". Maybe the linux installer is the problem, as it did never warn about it. I'm happy, because the server is running 24 hours without the crashing core problem now.
      W
      Whackie211Author
      Known Participant
      November 12, 2008
      No response?? What happened to "Asa - FMS"?

      We can't keep subjecting our users to these issues. We're seriously considering switching to Wowza Media Server Pro. Has anyone had any experiences with this software that they would like to share before we make the switch?
      Asa_-_FMS
      Adobe Employee
      Asa_-_FMS
      Adobe Employee
      November 12, 2008
      Hi Whackie,

      I'm not gone, just buried in details with the FMS 3.5 Release right now. Normally I would also have gotten notified of your response to this post but I didn't receive the private message you sent. I can empathize with your frustration, and I'm sorry if I made it any worse. I'd still like to take a look at that stack trace if you have it - I'd rather try regular email however - so please send it directly to awhilloc@adobe.com. I'll look at it as soon as possible. Please include the exact FMS build number that you were using when you generated the stack trace.

      Asa
      W
      Whackie211Author
      Known Participant
      October 31, 2008
      Hi Asa,

      I just sent you a private message with the call stack. I'm going to send you another message with a link for you to download a zip of the DMP files in case you need them to access more information from them.

      Thanks so much for your help!
      W
      Whackie211Author
      Known Participant
      November 5, 2008
      Have you been able to find any information based on the call stack and DMP files I sent you?
      T
      techeye
      Participating Frequently
      October 24, 2008
      FMS will take advantage of multiple cores, as it is heavily threaded and optimized for load. The FLVCheck tool says the flv is fine, so that is good. As a test, i used flash player 10 and was able to instantly start streaming from my FMS.

      A few questions:
      Are there any logs in the fms/logs/ directory that are suspect?
      If the jw_flv_player is not in the mix does it start playing instantly? (ie you just use flash player 10?)
      Does the issue happen after the app instance or fms service is restarted, or does it take a lot of uptime for the issue to occur?
      W
      Whackie211Author
      Known Participant
      October 27, 2008
      Thanks for the reply.

      Before posting all FLV files, I have an automated test using FLVCheck to make sure the file does not contain any errors.

      I checked the logs and the only strange thing I found in them was in the "edge" logs with multiple lines reading:
      "2008-10-16 13:23:38 6064 (w)2641213 Connection rejected by server. Reason : [ Server.Reject ] : Virtual host is not available. -"

      Unfortunately, I'm not sure what that even means. All of the settings in FMS are pretty much set as the defaults. The only thing I changed was to give the Admin interface access to only one IP address. And in the applications directory I simply copied the original "vod" folder and renamed it to "wmv" for us with the site.

      It's difficult to test the performance right now because the videos appear to be loading pretty quickly even with 380 concurrent connections right now. At the moment, I'm seeing the same performance/loading-time via the JW FLV Player and the Flash player directly.

      I've tried several times to restart the service and that usually improves the loading time quite a bit, but then after just 10 or 15 minutes, it begins to perform slowly again.

      Thanks again for any help that you could provide!
      Asa_-_FMS
      Adobe Employee
      Asa_-_FMS
      Adobe Employee
      October 27, 2008
      It sounds like you may be encountering a problem with your FMS. Typically you see those VHost unavailabe messages along with a hung core process - if that's the case you should be able to see messages in the master.00.log along the lines of "disconnecting unresponsive core". If that were the case I'd expect to see your connections slow down, then get better, and slow down again. Are you seeing anything like that? If not it could be something else. Also you mention running FMS 3, what is the precise version that you're running - as I want to make sure that your installation has all the latest fixes.
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