Scalability

[PatchaSravani2]

Question

I want to live stream 400 streams parallelly. Is this mediamtx server is capable of handling that many streams?

[aler9]

Hello, this server is used to handle thousands of streams at the same time, the limit is usually not CPU or RAM but the bandwidth of your network, so the only way to find out the maximum number of streams you can handle is to perform incremental tests on your infrastructure.

[pikachu937]

Hello, this server is used to handle thousands of streams at the same time, the limit is usually not CPU or RAM but the bandwidth of your network, so the only way to find out the maximum number of streams you can handle is to perform incremental tests on your infrastructure.

Greetings.
I would like to insert a little of myself and express my deep gratitude to the developer for such a wonderful product, there are many different implementations on the Internet, but in terms of speed, functionality and ease of operation, this project seems to me to be one of the best.
I have tested 2800 published streams (rtsp 720p) and, accordingly, 2800 broadcast streams (webrtc/rtsp) in a test environment. Everything works great on a computer with an intel core i9 processor (it is possible that it could work on an intel core i7), 128GB of memory and several groups of network interfaces combined in LACP.
In the process, I encountered a system limitation in the number of open files, but as we all know, in the Linux OS this limitation is easily bypassed. ATTENTION, when enabling the recording function (performed on a separate network server, the connection to which is made through a separate network interface), it was necessary to divide the server into containers (LXC/Docker), because mediamtx begins to freeze when the number of recorded streams exceeds 550, which is not surprising given such a load. As a result, I made a container limit of 100 published (including recorded) streams and 500 streams per broadcast, and as a result I got a lot of containers. As a result of the work done, the I/O load has dropped significantly and freezes are no longer observed. Expansion of network storage is expected ahead (by adding several nodes and redistributing disk arrays between them) to reduce the load on the network storage side.

PS. There is not enough function for clustering and searching for streams on servers, so that you can receive streams from different servers through one mediamtx server without first registering them on the main one.

[rfscheidt]

Hello @pikachu937 and @aler9 ,

I would like to set up a MediaMTX cluster to load balance the incoming requests. However, I need to first register the cameras using the API via /v3/config/paths/add/XXXXX, and at the time of the request, I won’t know which server the channel is on. Do you have any suggestions on how to handle this scenario?

Thanks for your help!

[pikachu937]

Hello. At first, we wrote a separate external application, which we added to server streams using the API. We store the list of cameras/streams in the database. As soon as the number of mediamtx servers increased and became more than one, it was decided to improve our applications and the corresponding databases, from which we receive controlled cameras/streams for adding via the API. For a specific stream, a server ID was issued in the database and now when the application is launched, its own stream is added to a specific server. In addition, given the information about which stream is connected, we were able to easily create a mediamtx proxy server, through which we can transmit a particular stream from different servers if necessary.

[rfscheidt]

Thanks!

[yelodevopsi]

@pikachu937 Thanks for sharing! I will presume the separate external application is a private project?
From what I read you use the stock/unmodified mediamtx-repo - as is - and develop more or less standalone modules/applications outside of this?

I ask since I see we're in the process of scaling up the MTX with the possibility with load balancing too and is curious to how you solved this.

We've made some ad-hoc solution with a REST API for saving/reading the mediamtx.yml config directly (to have persistence), but I see now that the "source of truth"/config should be maybe placed outside in some kind of load-balancer service or master-controller of some sort.

Would you care to share some of the architecture/structure of the db-application you are using? (if possible) 🙏

A wider question to both @pikachu937 and @aler9 maybe:

Sorry if I've missed any info about this - but are there a general common approach people take when building plugins/integrations towards the mediamtx today? I see that the core of the project should be simple, and thus I'm trying a way to modularize the current custom code I've developed on my own fork of the repo.