Recently I started my own video hosting service. It gets pretty popular but has only 2 servers. One is for encoding and one where files are stored after encoding finished. The question is regarding my second server (where files are stored). The server I have is pretty good. You hit player's play button and video starts after 1-2 secs without any lags or something but it is fine unless it gets to 150-200 online at time. After that my videos starts to load up really long. Sometimes it can take up to 3-5 minutes for video to start playing. So I decided to get a new better server and want to know what server hardware should I look for? My current server: Processor: i3-540 - 3.06Ghz Memory: 8GB DDR3 ECC Memory Hard Drive: 2 x 2TB SATA 7,200 RPM What should I upgrade here to handle, let's say, 1000 online at same time? P.S. By online I mean 1k people watching videos at same time. Will this server below be ok or is it too weak to handle 1000 online at same time? > E5-2430v2 - 2.50Ghz HT Haswell > 48GB DDR3 ECC Memory > 4 x 4TB SAS 7,200 RPM (RAID 10)
The upgrade to SAS drives will load your data faster, but if you upgrade to lets say SSD it will be much better in terms of performance, regarding the RAM and the CPU it should handle it, but what is the port speed ?
That server should handle things pretty well but yeah as mentioned above would need to know the port speed
That's going to be pretty tight when only at 300Mbps, when 1Gbps is available you would probably be ok. Also going to be depending on the quality/res, format of videos you are serving though.
It also depends on how big the files are as well. Being 3-5mins may mean they're 300 megs? The RAID 10 will give you much better performance but if possible two SSDs in a RAID 1 may be better. You'll need to figure out how much space you need as SSDs aren't always a good price point. Although they're better now than months ago.