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Comment by ChicagoBoy11 | Hacker News Reader

For those in the know, if I'm running something on my own that may only at any given moment see in the few hundreds of people using it, what's the best approach in terms of server-side infrastructure to support WebRTC apps? Is there any SaaS offering that has a meaningful product?

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We use Janus Gateway, and it works really well:

https://github.com/meetecho/janus-gateway

We have upwards of 100 simultaneous users on it every day, and at the moment it seems to be 100% reliable.

Mizu gateway also does the job:

https://www.mizu-voip.com/Software/WebRTCtoSIP.aspx

It has a nice config wizard and built-in STUN and TURN server.

A few hundred people should be fine! For fun I made https://github.com/pion/rtsp-bench and was doing 14k people before I saw my first hiccup.

You just need watch CPU Usage and Network attributes (loss, congestion etc...) Getting this right will take a little bit of WebRTC knowledge. Happy to answer any specific questions :)

There are also lots of hosted options as well! Real world WebRTC has a few different parts though, https://bloggeek.me/webrtc-server/ is a good intro I think.

Thank you for these resources -- I'll check them out!

Check out Vonage Video: https://www.vonage.com/communications-apis/video/ Their tech is based on a company they acquired, Tokbox. I used Tokbox’s services for large-scale real-time streaming; but their pricing is friendly for small-scale usage too. Solid service, with all the helpful extras you’ll likely need (recording videos, handling differences in browsers, etc.).

Depends a lot on what kind of app it is. There are orders of magnitude differences in requirements between apps that use data channels for relatively meager amounts of data (eg multiplayer games), or audio, or video, or video with server side realtime per participant transcoding etc.

Using Xirsys TURN servers happily (be careful some of their "getting started" examples are wrong). I tried to use Twilio, but failed, they did not recognize my mobile phone number. Even after begging 3 times to become their customer and paying for it, I could not succeed.

I had the same issue with Twilio, they couldn't send anything to my number because of the prefix. After many emails, they finally got it working - then two weeks later it was broken again and I simply gave up.

We have been using Twilio and we're sending them hundreds of dollars a month. I'm about to drop it because of their 2FA requirement. Either they accept customers that know how to manage passwords or they don't. I don't give my phone number to ANYONE any more.

You can use PubNub for reliable signaling and XirSys for TURN. I made an OS example of this a while back. https://github.com/ajb413/pubnub-js-webrtc

I've been using the Twilio Video product and have been pretty happy with it. They do the orchestration on the server so that you can have all of the users connect via WebRTC. It's very easy to use.

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