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We are going to build a application for school labs. Each lab contains maximum 60 students and all the students has to be connected in a local network. Each student will get a Android tablet or a desktop to watch the videos which will be served from a Lab's Server.

Here server has following tasks.

  1. It has to download videos from internet or cloud at some time in a day by manually or cron.

  2. It has to a run an Apache/Nginx server to stream the downloaded videos to all the students connected. we are thinking to code in NOdejs or python.

  3. It has to serve 50 to 60 clients for 2 hrs continuously in different batches. For example 4 different batch students(50 students) may come to the lab and listen to the videos. So server uptime will be 8 hrs per day with max 60 concurrent connections at a time.

Now, we are in a situation that do we need a dedicated server for serving clients offline or a desktop with good processor and RAM is enough?

Please guide us in this usecase. Happy to give more details.Please comment.

tvtv
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1 Answers1

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Looking at your requirements I don’t believe it has to be the most expensive server you can find.

I think you’d be very comfortable with a 16Gb RAM with maybe a low level Xeon or even desktop grade processor such as an i5. I’d suggest maybe some SSD storage to give you that quicker access, doesn’t have to be high volume necessarily and you could probably just archive off to some regular HDDs.

NGINX is my personal preference, I’d suggest springing for a decent network card though, but that might be useless dependant on the quality of your networking and subsequent hardware I.e don’t get a 10G card if you can’t make use of it.

In summary, my suggestion is:

  • 16GB RAM (DDR4 if possible)
  • low level Xeon / maybe i5?
  • SSDs in RAID 1
  • pair of archive HDDs in RAID 1
  • Debian / Ubuntu
  • NGINX
Timothy Frew
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