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VPS with 1Gbps unmetered, how many concurrent video views?
to make it simple...
if one has a cheap VPS (say on OVH)
with 1Gbps unmetered (300TB bandwidth per month)
and 1 video of 1080p, AV1 pre-encoded at 1Mbps,
then how many concurrent viewers could it endure?
because the videos are pre-encoded, and just on-demand stored,
it's basically just "playback" of multiple instances of it,
so it should be "easy" on the CPU or RAM
BANDWIDTH
for the bandwidth it seem easy to estimate the concurrent views
with 1Mbps (adding extra room of say 1.5 Mbps for delivery)
at 1Gbps unmetered = around 500 concurrent views
RAM
how much RAM would seem enough,
to MATCH THE BANDWIDTH limit
of around 500 concurrent video views?
CPU
how many vCORES would seem enough,
to MATCH THE BANDWIDTH limit
of around 500 concurrent video views?
SSD
since they are pretty fast these days,
it should endure the bandwidth limit
any ideas?
thanks
Comments
How do you plan to "watch" it? Browser instances? It will be RAM expensive for sure, you can measure usage yourself; CPU could be somewhat light if there is GPU offload available
500 youtube tabs going to be very expensive IMO
yes, just people clicking on the video, via browser,
do you (or anybody else) know of any service or tool
for such concurrent video views "load testing" ?
answer from ChatGPT:
Based on your scenario of 500 concurrent 1080p AV1 pre-encoded videos at 1 Mbps each, here's a friendly estimate of the VPS specifications you'll need:
CPU (vCores)
To handle 500 streams efficiently, especially with AV1 decoding (which is more CPU-intensive), I recommend at least 8 to 12 vCores.
If hardware acceleration for AV1 decoding is available, you might get away with fewer cores, but generally, 8+ cores provide a comfortable margin for smooth streaming and server management.
RAM
For buffering, managing connections, and overall system stability, around 8 to 16 GB of RAM should be sufficient.
If you expect additional overhead or plan to run other services alongside, leaning toward 16 GB is safer.
Summary
vCores 8 to 12
RAM 8 to 16 GB
--
can a human confirm this
from some experience?
thanks
It depends on a lot of factors.
CPU and RAM as you say won't be too bad if they are VOD. For SSD it will depend if you have enough RAM for the frequently visited files to be cached, as less ram = more cache churn and reading from disk.
Caching of requests will also come into play also if you use a CDN because it depends how many objects and the total size of data they will keep cached on your behalf. A CDN will significantly increase the capacity if implemented well.
Also the delivery method matters. Are you using HLS, LLHLS, WebRTC, or just basic HTTP? There's more overhead with stuff like WebRTC as you'd also need a STUN server, also LLHLS compared to regular HLS sends more requests for the smaller (and dynamic even per viewer) chunk sizes and can be harder to cache by CDN. You should also configure your webserver correctly to make sure it is supporting range requests, connection keepalives, avoid HTTP/1.x, etc.
Further nuances are that benchmarking will yield different results if you test locally on the same server, on another server on the same private network, from a single large remote client, or from a large number of small remote clients (most realistic).
In my experience, HLS and LLHLS livestreams (not VOD) of ~1500 real viewers of 1000kbps bitrate takes 1-2gbps of bandwidth. Which makes sense.
A simple tool you can use (used by NginX in their performance blogs for example) is wrk.
The post is unclear. Are you planning to "watch" videos in a web browser on the VPS? Or, are you planning to serve videos to visitors from the VPS?
If the latter, then you don't need much RAM at all. More RAM will help somewhat to cache frequently accessed files/disk blocks, but a good web server (Nginx or Caddy instance) will use very little RAM per visitor, and you could easily serve 1Gbit/s on an OVH VPS with 4GB RAM.
If you assume a port speed of 1Gbit/s, videos encoded at 1.5Mbit/s, then you'll be looking at about 400-500 concurrent visitor streams, allowing overheads and client buffering.
That would be 750Mbit/s of disk read, potentially quite random too, but with large blocks. So you'd be under 100MB/s and should get away without hitting any performance limits or penalties at a VPS provider.
thanks for the response,
when using 1 VPS just for the video hosting, and then via a simple HTML5 video tag,
embedding the video to another VPS, where the actual website is stored,
should make it even easier on the video hosting VPS (so that a 10 dollar one can do it),
and seems to be the most affordable option to get 500 concurrent video views.
dont forget client compability! not every client supports AV1.
you can use nginx/angie and cache media segments on RAM so no burden to disk.