[Icecast] (no subject)

[Jeremy Bierbach]

<23b252e0407090944ab5f8ef at mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <40EF2520.4050507 at groeneheks.nl>

Matt Farmer wrote:

>Thanks for your responce.  I was planning on doing both, the encoding
>and serving, form the same machine, and I'm not sure I see any
>stability gains by splitting it up.  Understand having, for example, a
>file server and mail server on different machines, so if one goes down
>you can still use the other.  But in this case, one service depends on
>the other (the server has nothing to serv with out the encoder, and
>the encoder has nothing to send it to with out the server), so I think
>having these on two different machines would actually lower
>reliablity.  Am I overlooking something?
>
>
The advantage of splitting up your encoder and your Icecast server
depends on your network setup and bandwidth availability. If, for
instance, you only have a relatively low-bandwidth connection (say 150
kbps upstream, like a cable connection) from the place you are doing the
encoding, then you probably don't want your Icecast server in the same
place-- you would only be able to have 3 simultaneous listeners or less
for a 50 kbps stream. Or maybe your studio is behind a firewall and it
is impossible or inconvenient to let network clients from the outside
world to get through to there.

In those cases, it's better to locate your Icecast server someplace else
that has a high-bandwidth connection and is open to the internet-- then
you only have to use 50 kbps of your studio's network connection, while
the Icecast server handles  tens or hundreds of simultaneous listeners.
To answer your question about necessary hardware, Icecast itself barely
uses the CPU at all-- it's just extremely efficient at moving data from
one socket to a bunch of others, but it doesn't do much if any
processing of the data. So you if you use a two machine setup, you will
always be safe using the slower one for Icecast or installing it on a
server that's already running Apache etc. Encoding, on the other hand,
is extremely CPU-intensive, so if you want to be able to comfortably do
other stuff with your encoding machine at the same time, the faster, the
better. But some people I know still use a 135 MHz or so Pentium for
encoding a single 32kbps MP3 stream, and that works just fine!