Varnish and mp3 streaming on demand

[Ole Laursen]

Andreas Fassl <afassl at ...> writes:
> Hi, especially the caching is very important for us, because we want to
> keep traffic away from the mp3 repository server.
> So you recommend:
> Client requests streaming on demand mp3 
> - lighthttpd does streaming and requests from
> - varnish as reverse proxy/cache from
> - mp3 repository

Well, I'd setup lighttpd on the MP3 repository server to serve the MP3 files.

So

  client -> varnish cache server -> lighttpd on mp3 repository server


However, why do you want to keep traffic away from the MP3 repository? If the
server can handle it, letting clients talk directly to it is clearly the most
efficient way of serving the files. If you stream MP3, it's probably < 256 kbit.
If you can get 1 Gbit out of your repository server, we're talking maybe
3000-4000 simultaneous listeners at 256 kbit. That sounds like a lot.

I guess it makes sense if you're a really large radio station or music site and
you need to scale up beyond that single server. You could then setup several
Varnish servers and have them cache the files automatically instead of
distributing the files manually over the nodes. Hmmm.



Ole