When designing a streaming workflow, do try to keep scaling in mind from the start. There's no one answer for when to scale your Wowza Streaming Engine deployment. Some form of load balancing is also generally required to route player connections to the correct servers in order to balance the cluster.
You can use different methods to scale depending on stream type and target audience, and you can use a combination of methods to suit your needs. Multiple servers arranged this way are called a "server pool" or "server cluster." Depending on hardware and infrastructure, servers can be added to or removed from the cluster manually based on estimated peak loads, or automatically based on real-time metrics. Scaling involves using two or more Wowza Streaming Engine servers to make your streams available to larger audiences. You can also incorporate a load-balancing system to offload player connections to less-loaded servers. When the limit is likely to be reached, you can scale your Wowza Streaming Engine configuration to handle increased capacity. The only sure way to determine the limits for a particular configuration is to perform load tests that show when performance is likely to degrade. The number of concurrent streams that Wowza Streaming Engine can comfortably manage varies depending on server hardware, network configuration, stream type, stream bitrate, and connection types.
When streaming live and video-on-demand (VOD) content from Wowza Streaming Engineā¢ media server software, the server can handle only so many concurrent streams before it starts to slow down or get overloaded. Perform a silent installation of Wowza Streaming Engine.Prepare config and log files for Support tickets.Collect information to debug connection count problems.Support XFF headers in HTTP streaming requests.Configure date headers for HTTP responses from HTTP providers.Use JConsole with Wowza Streaming Engine.
Configure Wowza Streaming Engine to use a proxy server to reach the license server.Troubleshoot licensing errors at startup.Troubleshoot Wowza Streaming Engine installation.Monitor server connections, load, and application statistics.Tune Wowza Streaming Engine for performance.
Create Apple App Store compliant streams (audio only rendition).Improve playback of lower-latency Apple HLS streams.Get HTTP and RTP performance statistics.Integrate user authentication with external systems.Publish securely from an RTMP encoder that does not support authentication.Take timed thumbnail snapshots of a transcoded stream.Disconnect clients after a specified time period.Resolve edge server stream requests to origin servers.Upload recorded media to an Amazon S3 bucket.Control access to your application by checking referer domain.Control which streams get packetized for HTTP streaming.Store SMIL files and VOD assets in different locations.Access content locally before trying a remote source.Loop a pre-roll until a live stream starts.Limit the number of viewers of a stream.Control Stream class streams dynamically.Control which streams get recorded by the nDVR recorder.Duplicate streams to another application instance.Filter audio-only rendition in Apple HLS auto-generated multi-bitrate playlist.Mix audio and video from different live sources.Send connection and stream statistics to Google Analytics.Validate Akamai server connections with Akamai G2O authorization.Add an audio track to a video-only stream.