Calculating bandwidth needs for Flash Media Server 3

If you want to incorporate audio, video, or both into your web applications, you should first develop a bandwidth strategy. The purpose of it is to ensure that the total amount of bandwidth served by Flash Media Server and consumed by each client is sufficient to deliver the quality of service you want, is in line with the physical hardware limitations and software licenses you have, and can accommodate various levels of traffic. Like any good functional specification, a bandwidth strategy should highlight any problem areas up front before you purchase systems or develop your application.

If you have not developed your bandwidth strategy yet, this article will help you out. It examines ways you can estimate your application's bandwidth to help determine your software license needs for Flash Media Server.

The amount of peak bandwidth used by Flash Media Server depends on a number of factors, such as the bandwidth that users connect at, the bandwidth in your pipeline, the bandwidth of the audio and video streams, and, of course, the type of application you develop—is it a one-way streaming application or a two-way/multi-way chat application?

To estimate the bandwidth that your Flash Media Server application will use, you will need to know the following:

• Number of simultaneous users your application must support at peak load
• Data transmission speed at which you expect your users to connect (what percent of users will be on a 56 Kbps dial-up connection, cable/DSL, or a LAN?)
• Number of audio/video streams your application will support per user
• Limitations of the server hardware and Internet connection
• Target encoding rate of the audio and video streams in your application

At this point you should also have a relatively firm idea of the functionality of your application and how users will be interacting with it. Now you need to figure out how to calculate your application's overall bandwidth.

Requirements

To follow along with this article, you'll need the following software:

Flash Media Server 3

• Try
• Buy

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