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Community Blog How to Select CPU and RAM of VPS for Video Streaming

How to Select CPU and RAM of VPS for Video Streaming

This article explains how to select the CPU and RAM of VPS for video streaming.

By Alain Francois

The consumption of digital content is becoming more disproportionate as options increase. Videos can be viewed in HD, with higher bandwidth consumption. There are also many resolutions above HD, such as 4K, resulting in exponential growth of Internet traffic in uploads and downloads. Your computer will have to work a lot to retrieve, encode, send, and stream audio and video content. Therefore, the processor and RAM are important components.

How Does Streaming Work?

Streaming can be defined as a system integrating a server and clients interconnected by a network as well as their software, designed to allow clients to access one or more multimedia streams from the server. The streams are served concurrently and independently, in real-time, and at the request of users. The client media player starts playing the file during the transfer, only a few seconds after the start of the download. As a result, the media data now occupies a large part of the bandwidth. If you want to satisfy the customer's request, a real-time server must be used to obtain short and guaranteed response times, which requires instantaneous distribution. These data are the ones that pose the most problems for their transport, given their particularities, such as large volume and time constraints.

Media Data Types

Streaming sends several types of data at once to offer good quality (FHD, 4K, etc.).

  • Audio: We find several types of audio services, such as mono, stereo, and audio CD.
  • Video: Several digital formats have been put in place by the different standardization bodies worldwide. They are used by video professionals in-studio on various digital formats.
  • Multimedia Applications: Multimedia applications involve the transfer of multimedia data between several computers. It can be conducted using a multicast, unicast, or broadcast.

Compression and Encoding

The digitized multimedia data occupies a large volume. The audiovisual sequences are compressed to save space and bandwidth. This reduces the storage space needed to store multimedia objects, but the objects still have large dimensions. Streaming providers use file formats that maximize quality over typical Internet speeds. Compression is completed using codecs and audio/video information in a standard file format.

Higher resolution video files result in more processing power the video editing program needs to run smoothly. During this process, the various components of the PC are subject to very important constraints:

  • Processor
  • Caching Data
  • Fast Access to Data
  • Graphical Core

Client - Server Interaction

There are different categories of servers that imply different interactions with clients:

  • Pull Server: The client manages the data transfer itself. Thus, each time the client needs data, it requests a block from the server. This makes it more difficult to manage resources on the server-side.
  • Push Server: The data transfer policy is left to the server. The transfer is completed by pushing the data to the client. The client requests a connection with the server and sends a request for a video. Then, the server sends him the video continuously while respecting the time constraints.
  • HTTP Protocol: It has the advantage of using existing web servers. The latter sends the response as quickly as possible in response to a request on an object with the push strategy.
  • Specialized Server: They improve streaming performance. The protocols they use (such as RTP - Real-Time Transfer Protocol) control the transfer of one or more synchronized streams. However, they consume much more resources than web servers.

Content Delivery Network (CDN)

A content delivery network (CDN) is a group of connected servers that cache and deliver content over the Internet. They have a goal of providing high-quality video to the end-user. The servers are located in various locations worldwide. Additional distance between a given server and the user adds more potential latency (lag time) to the Internet connection. Essentially, a livestreaming CDN makes streaming operate more smoothly for all viewers. Using a livestreaming CDN increases speed and reduces buffering by routing content to the server closest to the viewer. Also, it creates redundancy to ensure:

  • Scalability
  • Speed and Quality
  • Reliability and Security

Alibaba Cloud CDN supports intelligent popularity calculation and hierarchical caching of frequently requested resources. This enables you to precisely accelerate the resources that the users have requested. It also supports web page optimization and smart compression to accelerate delivery and integrates audio and video uploading, automatic transcoding, and media resource management to provide an all-in-one acceleration solution for on-demand streaming.

Memory and CPU

You also need to estimate the number of users that can possibly access your content concurrently, which means you will need to enhance the capacity and serve the visitor across the network.

Alibaba Cloud also offers General-purpose instance families, giving a good balance between processor and memory. You may need to compress and encode some data, which means the clock rate is an important factor. You have the ecs.g7ne instance family for network-enhanced general-purpose, which improves the network throughput and packet forwarding rate per instance. It uses Intel Xeon Platinum 8369HB (Cooper Lake) or Intel Xeon Platinum 8369HC (Cooper Lake) processors. The good point here is that it delivers a turbo frequency of 3.8 GHz and a minimum clock speed of 3.3 GHz to provide consistent computing performance and supports at least 450,000 connections.

You also have the ecs.g6 family type with at least 8 GB memory and 2 vCPUs, which uses 2.5 GHz Intel Xeon Platinum 8269CY (Cascade Lake) processors to deliver a turbo frequency of 3.2 GHz, providing consistent computing performance. This family instance type works well when large volumes of packets are received and transmitted, such as on-screen video comments.

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