Hardware requirements -- conferencing

[ruell magpayo]

Ive been digging thru conversation history here and found a couple of discussions with regards to hardware requirements,  but most if not all of it are from one way stream or few publishers only.

 

What is the recommended minimum hardware requirements for Conferencing?

Our requirement is in a single room, there are 10 users conferencing (publish and view streams).

therefore in one room, there will be

 

total connections = 10 users publishing + (10 users viewing * 9 streams) = 910 connections

 

And that just for stream, considering users need to text chat as well so the connections will be more than that.

 

That's a lot of connection for one room. Hence why we need to know hardware requirements.

 

Another question is, how many rooms can we host in one server, in what hardware.= requirements given the above situation.

 

I think it would be better and helpful for the community to teach us how to do computation for these hardware requirements, like maybe there is a table or a reference we can start and we do the computation ourselves =)

 

Thank you in advance.

[Mohit]

11 hours ago, dmitry027 said:

Hi, could someone please clarify the calculations of connections number here?

If we have 10 publishers in the room and each publisher is broadcasting only one stream and watching 9 streams of other participants, we have 10 (publishing) + 10 * 9 (watching) = 100 connections in total.

So the question is: why TS got 910 connections? Am I missing something?

Hi @dmitry027,

How are you?

For the conventional conference room for every N number of broadcasts, there are N (N-1) number of players.

So for 10 broadcasts, there are 10 (10-1) which is 90 players.

Thank you

[Burak]

Hi @dmitry027,
You are rights. For 10 participants room there will be 100 connections. But also let we remind that in newer versions (after 2.5.1) AMS provides some optimizations to decrease these numbers. Please check the related post:
https://antmedia.io/ant-media-server-new-conference-solution/

[Tahir]

Hi,

You can do the computation yourself already from the table under the page;

https://antmedia.io/cost-calculator/

The table shows the test results when no adaptive bitrate is enabled and the table shows the numbers as either the viewer or the publisher numbers, not at the same time. Also you can get better performance in bare metal machines and the numbers are to be on the safe use, they are not maximum. In case of spikes they won't fail immediately but you shouldn't cross the numbers on average to be safe from collapsing. 

Here you already calculated the required connections in SFU structure. 910 connections (most of them viewers) means you need one 32-core CPU machine or two 16-core CPU or three 8-core CPU machine depending on your resources. Room count actually does effect very little and it is negligible so we don't calculate it, what matters is how many publisher and viewer independent of how many rooms they are registered. So what I mean is that in your calculation you will make it based on the total connections as you already calculated it.

In MCU structure which is in beta right now, you can optimize your conference count drastically in terms of connection numbers, since the server takes and process the streams into 1 stream and sends it. However, it will create additional transcoding CPU usage in server. Since it is in beta, we can't release its numbers right now as it is in development still. You can make tests on it if you want to which can make us happy actually. 

Cheers

[ruell magpayo]

Thank you for a very detailed reply,

How about RAM requirement, how should we do computation for it?

 

 

[Tahir]

It is really much more complicated than CPU usage and fluctuates between operating systems, general rule of thumb we do is that if you look at the aws C type instances, their ram versus CPU is sufficient for each cases. Which their pattern is 2 times the CPU core count in GB. What I mean is for a 4 core CPU instance 8 GB RAM will be sufficient, if you plug 4 GB RAM it will be your bottleneck. You can go on like for a 16 core machine 32 GB RAM is sufficient.

 

 

[ruell magpayo]

Oh I missed your offer to test the MCU feature, is is included in current releases already and we can test it now?

also where can i find the documentation on how to proceed testing it?

 

 

 

[Tahir]

Please send an e-mail to support@antmedia.io stating that you want to test the MCU, we will send you the version with MCU and the instructions. Cheers.

 

 

[dmitry027]

Hi, could someone please clarify the calculations of connections number here?

If we have 10 publishers in the room and each publisher is broadcasting only one stream and watching 9 streams of other participants, we have 10 (publishing) + 10 * 9 (watching) = 100 connections in total.

So the question is: why TS got 910 connections? Am I missing something?

Edited January 22 by dmitry027