FCS MX and scalibility

[sprout74]

My company is looking into FCS as a solution for bringing video to our website as well as a possible solution to a project running over a LAN that needs to deal with video.

For the LAN project there will be a lot of client machines requesting the video over the network, and we need to worry about server load.

Does anyone know about:

- how many connections for a video stream a single installation of the software can handle?

- can requests be filetered to different machines, so Flash clients that request video get routed to a particular video FCS installation, but ones using a text chat go to another?

- are there load balancing techniques for FCS?

Thanks,

sprout

[sprout74]

I found this article on MM's site.

http://www.macromedia.com/devnet/mx/.../scalable.html

any real world experience people have had would be greatly appreciated.

I think scalibility is one of the key factors people look at when looking into a streaming service.

thanks,

sprout

[psychlonex]

Hey -

I've seen text-only chat's with over 500 users without any trouble, though video might be a different story.

I think the first thing to look at with video/audio is bandwidth. I haven't had the server bomb out yet, no matter what I do to it (aside from intinite loops!), so my theory is that the machines bw limits will be hit before the cpu/memory limits are touched.

As far as load-balancing, I've had success using one server as the central point. It keeps track of how many users are on each other server (via proxied netConnections, initiated by the remote servers). Each user first connects to this server. When a client connects, this server first finds the the server with the smallest number of users. Then it rejects the connection, with an error message telling the client which server it should connect to. Then the client connects to that server. That server then tells the central server how many users it has.

Hopefully that makes sense, and you can see how you'd set it up. It has the downside where if the central server goes down, your whole system is broken, but this can be worked around by giving the client a fall back server, where it just connects to one of the video servers if it can't reach the central machine.


psx