Flash Media Server 3

Hello,
We have a client who is going to be developing a media portal to project their current initiatives in a dynamic multimedia environment. They've chosen to use flash for this, and we are curious if Flash Media Server 3 would help with the server load. I've worked with flash / acitonscript / php / XML-MySQL for a few years now, but never had any need to look into scalability for a large volume client. The clients primary site gets about 30K unique IPs a day, but we are going to be a small subset of that. We currently are uncertain what % of those IPs will be interested in the media portal.

We've looked at both offerings from Adobe, and as far as we can tell, we can't see any benefit to the interactive server, but if from the brief write up, if anyone can give me some feedback it would be appreciated. The big question is primarily - does flash media server improve delivery performance over a standard apache server.

Short answer: no. It's not going to help save bandwidth, nor help reduce server load. It will increase server load.

It CAN save bandwidth if you are working with streaming a lot of video for a few reasons, but it doesn't seem like your client needs that. For regular as/php/xml/mysql stuff, I don't even see how you can use FMS. It's pointless. FMS is used for consistent connections between server and client. Used primarily for true streaming video, and multiplayer games.

Besides that, the cost of FMS is expensive, and it would probably be better spent dumping the money into a little beefier server instead.