How can I stream 400 relayed radio channels to up to 90k customers?

[fredastaire]

Hi all

We currently stream about 400 (relayed) radio channels to 20k up to 90k customers in parallel and now we look for new infrastructure and a new unicast streaming software.
How does Steamcast scale compared to Icecast and Shoutcast? Does there maybe exist another Software we can use for pure relaying?
Thank you for your feedback!

Regards,
Frederik

P.S.: Does there exist some professional multicast streaming software?

[Max]

Steamcast should perform very well in pure relay states. Ultimately how exactly it'll perform will depend on multiple factors including, but not limited to, hardware, network connection, bitrate, how many stations, and how many listeners. In my internal testing environments I have been able to max out a 1Gbps connection fairly easily. In a pure test of the software itself using a 64kbps stream I loaded around 63,000 loopback users onto one station pushing about 4.5Gbps. However, there are operation system limits at this point. The maximum amount of ports available to any given system is 65535 and some of them are utilized in other processes.

To more accurately test this I would recommend you setup a Steamcast server as a test and just see for yourself how it performs. We do not have statistics about performance of Steamcast in comparison to Shoutcast or Icecast.

[fredastaire]

Hi Max,

The major part of the relayed streams has bitrates between 128kbps and 256kbps, i.e. in worst case the max. outbound traffic is 90k x 256kbps = 23Gbps. All servers have a 10GB-based network interface (redundant), i.e. there is be enough bandwidth per sever.

The streaming infrastructure will have to be site redundant with n loadbalanced servers per site (n depends on the servers performances and capacity). Did you or somebody else already try such a setup with steamcast?

And it would be nice to have an API to modify the settings of the server without the GUI. Does there exist some additional library, plugin or add-on we could use?

Regards,
Frederik

[Max]

Hi,

We do not have the hardware on hand to do those tests (Steamcast is free and makes no money for us to buy such hardware). But theoretically Steamcast itself should be able to handle this. There is no software limit on the maximum amount of listeners. We use C++11 Std lib classes like queue, map, etc. So the limits are going to be with the hardware of the machine it runs on.

An API is planned in a future version. However, if you can pass "r" and enter to the Steamcast console window you can get it to reload its configuration file, steamcast.conf.

[fredastaire]

Hi Max

Sending an "r" to the console should not be a problem.
Thank you for the hint!

Kind regards,
Fred