[Icecast] Max Icecast Listeners

[Raymond Lutz]

I am curious if anyone has had enough experience to know --> how many 
simultaneous listeners can be supported by typical server boxes, 
assuming unlimited bandwidth is available?

My specific case:
My server (http://www.AirProgressive.org) is on a Linux VPS server 
located in a datacenter and on a optical backbone so that bandwidth is 
not the problem. Each connection I am running is at 32kbps and 22050 Hz 
sampling rate (mono) since the program is "talk radio". The bandwidth 
available per month is 6000 GB and at an average of 4.5 hours per week 
of listening, which is what similar stations had in this area of the 
same genre, I can service about 21,000 listeners per month.  The peak 
would be at least 562 listeners at any one time, which is the average. 
Let's just assume the peak is 10,000 listeners at a time. How many 
servers do I need to support that? (and more importantly, how do I 
figure it out?)

Q2: does icecast provide any warnings when it finds it is unable to keep 
up with the workload? What sort of failure mode will occur? Gaps in the 
transmission, dropped listeners, ?

Thanks for your help.

--Ray Lutz

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Raymond Lutz
Cognisys, Inc.
1010 Old Chase Ave., Bldg B
El Cajon (San Diego Cty), CA 92020 USA
Voice 619-447-3246
http//www.cognisys.com