Good day,

We are potential LINODE.com customers and are hoping someone can assist us with our questions regarding bandwidth and hosting requirements.

We are a start up entertainment company whose website will enable our artists to communicate with their fan base through our own proprietary Video Chat application. We are working on our website but it has not been launched yet. The artists and their fans will be located in different geographically areas but will be able to communicate with each other through the Video Chat application via our website.

We are currently finalizing our Cost & Expenses Analysis and our questions are:

1. From your experience, for this type of application, how much should we expect to consume in bandwidth usage per person per hour?

2. Based on the answer in our 1st question, can we just directly multiply ‘the bandwidth usage for (1) person’ to determine the usage for 5,000 users and 10,000 users?

If anyone knows about or has experience with this issue, your response / recommendations will be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

You're kidding right? You're finalizing your business model and your IN HOUSE developers and IT people haven't already run numerous tests and sand boxes cases to figure this out?

For each client, you'll have an inbound video stream and an outbound video stream. So, figure how much your payload will take based upon the codecs you're using (video AND audio), add a safety margin for any multimedia framing, then add another 64 bytes or so per packet for IP and other transport overhead.

In the VoIP world, we might have a 64 kb/sec codec with 20 ms packet spacing... that's 160 bytes of payload per packet and 64 bytes of overhead, for 224 bytes per 20 ms, 11200 bytes per second, or 89.6 kb/sec. This is significantly greater than the 64 kb/sec payload throughput, but that's what you get with packet switching.

Oh, and double it, because there's two directions of voice traffic per call (phone switch -> user and user -> phone switch). Oh, and double that again, since the user probably is talking to another person and not just the phone switch.

Round up in all calculations.



Probably.

3



Pineapple.

Measure it -- there is no other way to get reliable figures.


Yes -- but the whole exercise will be futile unless the answer to Q1 is based on measurements, rather than pulling numbers out of your a**.

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/ Peter

The scale you're talking about is pretty high-end, and you'd want to make arrangements with Linode for extremely high-bandwidth usage (to lower costs). If you assume a low-bandwidth video stream of 300Kbps, and you're talking about 10,000 people watching that stream, then that is 3Gbps. That would require multiple Linodes, obviously, since each one is only on a gigabit port (and you can't monopolize that either since other people need to use it).

One hour of use would require 1350 GB, which at Linode costs about $135, assuming you're pre-committing to it.

If you wanted to stream to 10,000 people at a time for four hours a day, 20 days a month (say), then that would cost about $10,800 per month.

You may be able to reduce this by making a deal directly with Linode. At those kinds of volumes (108TB per month), you'd probably be able to get a substantial discount, although I'm just guessing.

It may be blasphemous to say on this forum, but I don't think Linode is the correct hosting solution for this kind of application on the scale (5000-10000 concurrent users) you suggest.

Going by Guspaz's above figure of 3Gbps, your usage would be higher than the average bandwidth consumption of all other Linode users combined.

Not to downplay Linode, but without special arrangements you'll find much more suitable options for this kind of usage elsewhere.

There's 100tb.com for all your raw bandwidth needs

I wouldn't outright agree with that, as the OP invented numbers out of thin air. Since it will likely be more like 10 - 50 concurrent users (realistically), Linode will be more than enough.

Since the OP isn't sure about total bandwidth consumption, this sounds like an idea with no technical staff on board yet. Which is great: Linode is a fantastic place to get a business started and grow it technologically. We scale well.

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Disclaimer: I am no longer employed by Linode; opinions are my own alone.

A solution like Linode, one that allows you to dynamically allocate and deallocate additional resources may be very benefial to the OP. I know the OP gave a number for concurrent users, but I would imagine the actual load would vary dramatically by what is currently going on.

As already mentioned, bandwidth I think will be the real challenge.

I agree with that.
Bandwidth will be the major challenge.