[Icecast] Education - 1, 000s, 100, 000's, Millions of listeners. (What kind of infrastructure)

[Fred Gleason]

On Mar 20, 2024, at 13:16, Wayne Barron <wayne at cffcs.com> wrote:

> In Windows and Linux web servers, we can create a forest for our web servers.
> Send traffic to different servers to even the workload.
> 
> Can we do something like this with the Icecast servers?
> (or)
> Will we have to install new VMs, add the heavy stations on that one,
> and send the new traffic there?

Ok, I’m going to be “that guy”…

I would argue that, as soon as you’ve hit an audience size of 10,000 or more (especially if that audience is at all geographically dispersed), IceCast is basically off the table. The reason why can be summarized in three letters: “CDN” [Content Distribution Networks].

To fan out to large, geographically dispersed audiences of 10,000 or more (not to mention 100k’s or, Lord help us, 1M’s or more), you need to get content cached in locations that are geographically close to your listeners. By far the easiest (read: most cost effective) way to do this at scale is to leverage the already existing infrastructure of CDNs (companies like Akamai or CloudFlare, that have a world-wide footprint). That means using streaming formats that utilize segmented distribution mechanisms, such as HLS or DASH. You can kinda-sorta do this sort of thing with IceCast by using relays, but it’s complex to configure and monitor while being not well supported at many CDNs (Akamai for example discontinued their IceCast product offering several years ago). HLS OTOH plays very well with that infrastructure because it’s effectively just a bunch of static files that get replicated via HTTP[S]. No special “server” software is required; bog-standard Apache or Nginx work just fine, because the complex “media handling” bits have been intentionally pushed to the endpoints; namely the encoder and (especially) the players. Today though, when FOSS HLS audio encoders are available and pretty much every browser supports playing HLS content natively, the complexity angle can be largely ignored by content creators.

Just my take. That, and 2 € will get you a (cheap) cup of coffee…

Cheers!


|---------------------------------------------------------------------|
| Frederick F. Gleason, Jr. |             Chief Developer             |
|                           |             Paravel Systems             |
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|    All progress is based upon a universal innate desire of every    |
|    organism to live beyond its income.                              |
|                                                                     |
|                                                  -- Samuel Butler   |
|                                                  "Notebooks"        |
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