What kind of server specs are needed for streaming audio from a web server?

I am working on a podcast website right now and am wondering if someone can help me out with some numbers for server load.

Right now I have a cheap server from Digital Ocean: 512MBMemory 1 CoreProcessor 20GBSSD Disk 1TBTransfer

I am worried about the load because all the audio data is stored on the webserver. I am estimating that right now MAX I will have ~40-50 users all downloading and/or streaming from the website at the same time. The podcast files will be ~50MB.

Do you think those numbers can be sustained by my dinky server? Any advice would be appreciated!

Cheesegraterr

Posted 2015-02-11T21:32:10.347

Reputation: 167

Not sure about the size of Audio file you have in the server. If the design is by caching those audio files to server then suggestion would be increase your RAM based on Size of the audio Files. – Anvesh Vejandla – 2015-02-11T21:45:04.507

Answers

You have not specified the streaming server you plan on using but 512 megs should be more then adequate for Icecast. I've not used it in any signiificant way, but I found this post showing 1800 listeners on 512 megs was practical back in 2008.

1 TB capacity should be ample for 50 simultanous streams - provided the streams are 128k or less is you have a 10 megabit connection or 1 megabit or less if you have a 100 megabit connection - leaving a comfortable margin.

davidgo

Posted 2015-02-11T21:32:10.347

Reputation: 49 152

The server isn't playing the audio file; it is only 'serving' it. The client does the audio processing. You should worry about the bandwidth instead.

There is no way any normal connection can beat the transfer rate of an SSD drive, so I don't think you have to worry about the hardware itself. Bandwidth will be the bottleneck here.

Do you think your 40-50 users will use up the 1 TB connection?

Nelson

Posted 2015-02-11T21:32:10.347

Reputation: 1 199