Doest it Make server Load?

[aliop]

well i have streaming media on my server and there come 10 person listining to that music at one time
does it make server load high?
or having 40 online user in website just browsing html page?

thanks

[choster]

aliop, welcome to WebmasterWorld.

I'm not sure I completely understand your question but yes, streaming over HTTP will add to your server load. A web page normally takes only a fraction of a second to deliver but even a short clip will be several seconds, perhaps minutes, during which the server and connection will be tied up. Depending on your bandwidth and your server's configuration, your performance will degrade noticeably when there are a large number of simultaneous users.

If the primary purpose of your site is to deliver video, for instance, I'd seriously consider contracting a third party host which specializes in streaming media, or install dedicated streaming software on your server to free up the HTTP server for regular web pages.

[trillianjedi]

Actually, server CPU load is relatively low for streaming audio/video. All the server is doing is sending a data stream to a socket connection.

The big drain is on bandwidth.

I have a server running with 150 users connected at any given moment for streaming audio, and the CPU load is negligible - 1 or 2% peak. In fact, my "tail -f logfile" on the server daemon was using more clock cycles than the server itself.

Bandwidth on the other hand is scary (peak 6-7 hundred megabits an hour).

You can check it quite easily, on Linux run "TOP", on windows run "Task Manager".

Modern PC's are scary fast at crunching numbers. The weak link will always be bandwidth. Even the lowliest modern server can easily pipe hundreds of megabits per second around it's data bus.

If you're going to be streaming large amounts of media, put the media onto a seperate server. But we've had no problems running the two side by side on the same box. Seperating hard drives for media/web pages can be a good idea.

Serving web pages is very differnet - it's burst activity, so to a degree, it gets naturally "serialised". It's very unlikely that everyone will click onto a page at exactly the same moment.

Media is different - it's generally parallel streams.

My advice is just keep an eye on system resources.

I am assuming you're on a dedicated server of course, if that's not the case, if you don't know what everyone else on that server is doing, you'll have problems monitoring it. That may just mean real-world testing - "how fast does it load for me?".

TJ

[aliop]

thanks very much for replies :-)

i am using shared hosting but soon i change to my own hosting i have adsl 2mb/512kbs connection.

[trillianjedi]

2mb/512kbs connection.

If you're hosting from it, bear in mind the important number is the 512 kbs, as the load will be 99% upstream.

However, by it's nature, ADSL is asynchronous, so even when you're using your download side, the upload side is being loaded.

TJ

[Herenvardo]

well i have streaming media on my server and there come 10 person listining to that music at one time
does it make server load high?

I'll try to be accurate: if somebody wants to listen music from a website, might happen two things:
- The file is played directly as it comes to the local machine. this happens usually with midi background music and similar. In this case, your server load will get a little increase for each listener during all the listening time.
- The file is downloaded and then played in the local machine. usual with mp3. Your server load will increase more significantly while the file is being downloaded, but the resources will be freed once it is on the local machine.

or having 40 online user in website just browsing html page?

You will get server load when the pages are being downloaded by the browser. once downloaded (when the user really begins to browse the page) there will be no load. Going further, most of browsers (including IE, the most used) keep copies of frecuently visited pages in a cache on the local hard disk. When the browser access that cache, there is no load.

Hoping be useful,
Herenvardö

PS: Welcome to WW ;)