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Comment by LinuxBender | Hacker News Reader

That could be true, especially if one live streams 24/7. It might be a nifty proof of concept if they set up a live demo without a CDN on a bog-standard VPS provider like Linode, DigitalOcean, Vultr, etc... Does anyone here have this running in one of the VPS providers?

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Here's an instance running on Linode: https://live.retrostrange.com/

List of instances: https://directory.owncast.online/

Nice! What is the highest number of viewers you have ever seen on a stream at once?

I just found it in the list, wonder the same.

Phil here, I run the RetroStrange TV channel. We’ve seen hundreds but not sustained over time. Average currently 2-15 viewers at a time. I’d love a stress test.

Running the numbers for 300 streamers at ~3Mbps each for ~30 hours a week works out to 12,150,000MB. That value * 4 for about monthly bandwidth usage. For a s-4vcpu-8gb instance on DO, that's ~$436 monthly overage on a $40 monthly cost droplet. Not too insane, but you're really stressing out that single droplet. You'd probably want to balance that across a few different instances across the country instead of it all being on a single droplet, in which case you're essentially rolling your own probably crappier CDN and trading CDN costs for your time managing it all.

Agreed that was my thought process as well. One could spin up a few dozen instances, start the live stream and then nuke the instances. That should scale to however many viewers one has. I guess that begs the question does this application have the instrumentation or hooks that would make it super simple to scale up nodes on demand? Like an API to query number of viewers and their bandwidth settings to calculate required capacity.

For ~300 streamers, wouldn’t a single symmetrical fiber 1gbps line, like a residential AT&T install, basically cover it?

The TOS prohibits it but I always figured it’d be fine so long as one didn’t get too popular. I guess I’m wondering to what extent increased residential bandwith keeps CDN bandwidth cost in check.

Streamers won't want to serve directly from their home IP because it makes them a DDOS target.

Ddos prevention never crossed my mind, good point. I don’t spend much time in the gaming community. Who would be the most likely attacker, a competitor in the game trying to get an advantage? If so, thats kinda fascinating in a way. It’s almost like a cyberwar scenario where the battlefield is virtual and physical.

it's both, competitors in the game (or just trolls) have attacked random in-game players using IPs leaked from things like VOIP chat in games (which is often implemented P2P rather than running through the server) and people also specifically go after streamers to harass them.

https://www.eurogamer.net/dead-by-daylight-streamers-are-bei...

Other than the DoS attempts the sibling mentioned, the symmetric Gigabit on a home connection varies depending on congestion, and NAT mapping could change changing your IP causing the whole Livestream session to renegotiate.

I've livestreamed with ffmpeg and Icecast fanned out to a layer of cheap VPS and that worked ok. Yes there was enough lag to be annoying but not anything like 40 seconds.

Also interested to know this. How many people watching can a cheap VPS like Linode handle?

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