[Live-devel] A question on Live555ProxyServer

[Ross Finlayson]

There is no inherent limit in our code as to how many ‘back-end’ servers (and/or ‘front-end’ clients) the “LIVE555 Proxy Server” can support.

Scalability problems like you describe can sometimes be caused by running into an (operating system-imposed) limit on the number of sockets that your application can have in use at any time.  See
	http://live555.com/liveMedia/faq.html#scalability

Another thing to note is that for each proxied stream, the total network bandwidth used by the proxy server is N+1 times the bandwidth of the proxied stream, where N is the number of ‘front-end’ clients.  Multiply this by the number of proxied streams, and you end up with a significant network bandwidth - which can easily approach the capacity of your network (which can often be significantly lower than the nominal bandwidth of your computer’s network interface - especially if the 'back end' stream and/or 'front-end' client is using RTP/RTCP-over-TCP.  (RTP/RTCP-over-TCP streaming should be avoided, whenever possible.)

People often misjudge how much bandwidth video streams actually use, and discover that as they start proxying more and more streams (and/or add more and more 'front-end' clients), the capacity of their network quickly becomes a limiting factor.  (Once again, this is not a limit in our code.)

Ross Finlayson
Live Networks, Inc.
http://www.live555.com/