#1 2009-06-25 12:22:45

**_thomasattrp_**

Live Video Streaming Bandwidth Usage

In working with Adobe on preparing an Adobe sponsored Connect Pro meeting, we proposed using the live video streaming.  A response from Adobe was as follows:

"Just keep in mind that the more people we have in the room, the slower the streaming video is and sometimes it clogs things up."

Our Connect Pro account is hosted. Assume the proposed meeting will be on Adobe's server.

We have used live video frequently, but with small numbers of participants--never more than about 20.  Seems to work fine, even with two video pods active at the same time.

Can someone explain what happens when there are a lot of participants to "clog things up"?
At what point does this start happening, i.e. how many participants?
Is this a problem with the Adobe server's capacity?

Etc.

Thomas

**_roysdenc_**

Re: Live Video Streaming Bandwidth Usage

Thomas -
    From my expereince, the main thing that happens when things get "clogged up" is decreased performance.  As a hosed account, you are sharing bandwidth with everyone on your cluster.  Now, we would expect that Adobe would have sufficiant systems in place for load balancing, limiting number of accounts on a cluster, and proper babndwidth on the cluster itself, but one of the possible suspects of my audio issue after SP2 was the load on the cluster (which was never ruled out).  This is also why you may see varying performance on a Monday morning presentation versus a Wednesday lunch time meeting.  More users on the system means decreased performance. 

I do not have numbers or anything like that to indicate when problems occure, but I can tell you I have been given the impression that NA3 (for example) has hundreds of accounts, with hundreds of meetings through out most days.  Obviously load changes from day to day, but I use the assumption that I am sharing my space with 500 other acoounts, with an average of 50-100 people per account using the system at the same time I want to.  This is possibly setting the bar high, but sets my expectations accordingly. 

In the end, Adobe should be setup to support usage such as you describe even with all the other usage, should be looking to adding new clusters, and preferably migrate customers from an over loaded cluster to the new ones if they come.  They should also determine thresholds for how many accounts to have on a single cluster, and possibly additional ways to optimize the performance of the existing clusters.

Just my thoughts
-Chris