Post by b***@hotmail.com....so suppose I'm casting a rock concert over the net, and I expect a lot of clients, what happens when the load overshoots that of 1 server? When there are multiple servers for the same video, is 1) the camera feed and audio etc. connected to each of those servers individually?,
and then
You would usually send the camera feed to one server, and the have
that server feed a second tier of servers.
Post by b***@hotmail.com2) Do I use a simple DNS round-robin thing to get people to use whatever server, or is there some better way that's used?
Yes, that works.
But probably the better way is to send a check to a CDN like Akamai
(or one of their competitors) and let them do all the heavy lifting.
You feed them one stream, and they then feed it to all your users.
Basically about what happens in the above scenerio, but you're not
buying the bandwidth and servers to do all that. The content
distribution networks have many servers around the world, and end up
serving most users from a node "nearby", so they have massive
advantages in providing bandwidth.
Of course this depends on how much of this you do. If you're going to
do a handful of concerts, you're never going to be able to justify
spending the required money to build the infrastructure that can
handle the necessary peaks for a handful of hours per year - so a CDN
is almost impossible to avoid.
OTOH, if you're going to do this 24x7 for years, it may be worth your
while to do yourself - but you'd then rent servers (and bandwidth) in
various geographic locations, and basically duplicate the distribution
function that the CDNs provide for you.
Multicasting is occasionally an alternative, but usually has too much
trouble getting past firewalls.