Which server runs your radio?
  • Lets run this thread to figure out what works best for the internet radio from the server side.

    Cloud, Shared hosting, Virtual private server, Dedicated server, old PC in a garage, Mac Mini attached to a wall?

    So far I tryed Airtime on Amazon's Elastic Computer Cloud (EC2), running a micro instance under their Free Tier.
    Found a Ubuntu Linux Amazon Machine Image (AMI) that fits under the free tier, and installed all the components and Airtime, 1.8.2 RC3 at that time.

    Long story short, it didn't work well: as the CPU power is granted to the micro instance in short bursts, 24/7 broadcast was not feasible - the liquidsoap process was always short of CPU power and the sound stream interrupted constantly.

    This time as we got some financing, I'll be targeting a dedicated server with a 3GHz processor. We'll see how many listeners it can handle.

    So, what about you, guys?
  • 10 Comments sorted by
  • Well for me I am planning on running the following architecture:

    Home (studio in future):
    VMWare ESXi infrastructure (Pentium D 2.something GHz CPU - planning on something more powerful soon!)
    - icecast virtual machine
    - genre 1 Airtime virtual machine
    - genre 2 Airtime virtual machine
    - darkice virtual machine for 'live' stream

    1Mbps uplink to:

    Dedicated server with 100Mbps connection to internet (Dual Xeon 2.8Ghz CPU, 4Gb RAM)
    - icecast instance relaying icecast streams from home server

    Obviously for a low spec machine the CPU will affect the number of streams the machine can serve, but primarily it'll be the available bandwidth that is the restricting factor; my dedicated server is good for approx. 1000 concurrent streams (if I can get decent quality at 64k) which will then be the 100Mbps used to capacity.
  • Currently I'm trying to run it on an EC2, free tier but no luck, the playlist doesn't see my songs. I read in several posts that airtime won't work on EC2 micro instances, How did you manage to install it?
  • Vote Up0Vote Down Andrey PodshivalovAndrey Podshivalov
    Posts: 1,526Member, Administrator, Sourcefabric Team
    Please, do not try use micro instance for airtime. You just spent time but w/o result.
  • Vote Up0Vote Down Jakub GórnickiJakub Górnicki
    Posts: 134Member, Administrator, Sourcefabric Team
    Cool thread Sergei! Thanks for his and keep it up!
  • What I wonder about Andrey, is that I only have issues with loading the playlist.. :| it doesn't list the songs i upload
  • Vote Up0Vote Down Albert FRAlbert FR
    Posts: 1,978Member, Airtime Moderator
    I've few webradios on :
    http://www.online.net/serveur-dedie/offre-dedibox-dc.xhtml
    (but that's only for french users :(
    Post edited by Albert FR at 2011-12-01 08:00:06
  • Vote Up0Vote Down Andrey PodshivalovAndrey Podshivalov
    Posts: 1,526Member, Administrator, Sourcefabric Team
    Waleed said:

    I only have issues with loading the playlist.. :| it doesn't list the songs i upload



    seems media-monitor is not working due to system overload or something else. You can create an image based on running micro instance
    (ebs version only) and start new small one from this image and
    check how airtime is working.
  • Reply to @Waleed:

    Waleed, if you look in /var/log/airtime/media-monitor/media-monitor.log you will probably see errors about multiqueue not being defined. This is a known issue with EC2 micro instances. You can use this post to fix it: http://forum.sourcefabric.org/discussion/comment/13508#Comment_13508

    But please note that EC2 instances are not for Airtime!!! The audio playback will be choppy and your listeners won't get a good radio experience!!
    Airtime Pro Hosting: http://airtime.pro
  • ok I guess I'll drop EC2, What about Media Temple (ve) VPS. anything about that one?
  • Vote Up0Vote Down Andrey PodshivalovAndrey Podshivalov
    Posts: 1,526Member, Administrator, Sourcefabric Team