Stream this ... no ... really ...

Ok. I asked for pointers to free as in Libre video. Stuff we can use for testing streaming performance. And load the JackRabbit system, with multiple clients pulling these videos. So first you need a video server. Well, IIS can do it in windows, but as I have discovered, Apache 2.2.9 does a somewhat better job of serving media on Windows 2003. Not sure why yet, may look. So now we have the mpeg of “The Brain that wouldn’t die”. From the Internet Archive. And we can use this to test streaming. We have several of these videos. Enough to swamp the main memory (4 GB in 32 bit Windows 2003 server R2 enterprise edition), so we are pulling from disk. Which is one of the strengths of JackRabbit.

Using mplayer, I asked around and found out that we can run it without it generating a display or audio. To do this, run it as mplayer -vo null -ao null URL Now I have 6 clients pulling on the JackRabbit. One per network interface. What is the utilization on the JackRabbit? Not even measurable. Yeah, I see all these “we support 10,000 streams” on a 10 GbE port. I haven’t looked into what they are measuring, but it isn’t what we are. 720x480 MPEG at 30 fps. 0.5 MB/s. Ok, mplayer reports it as

VIDEO:  MPEG2  720x480  (aspect 2)  29.970 fps  3500.0 kbps (437.5 kbyte/s)

So, to fill up 1 Gb/s, which is ~120 MB/s, we would need about 240 streams of this. Over the 10 ports on this machine, this would be ~2400 streams of this movie. Not bad. Now I need to see how many mplayers I can launch per machine. 4 cores, 3 GHz on one 2.66 GHz on the other. Will do that tomorrow.