[Icecast] load constraints

[Daniel Ballenger]

On 5/20/05, Dan Stowell <danstowell at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Iain,
> 
> It's a simple answer:
> 
> > For example, if a box on a 128kbps upload connection is
> > serving a 64Kbps stream (and not audio-on-demand) - is it limited to two
> > connections
> 
> Yes it is.
> 
> > or is icecast somehow more efficient?
> 
> No - icecast can't work miracles! The underlying technology of the
> internet (the way it is at present, at least) only allows a packet of
> information to be sent to one computer, so icecast needs to replicate
> each chunk of data for every client it wants to broadcast to.
What about multicast routing?  Doesn't this achieve that?  Just curious :)

> Ways to get round this (apart from getting a very fat pipe) include
> setting up relays so that more than one computer (more importantly,
> more than one internet connection) is broadcasting the signal, which
> means you have to have some way of 'distributing' your listeners among
> the relays (you'll see lots of discussion about relays in the
> archive).
> 
> Dan
--Daniel