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I have found it's hard to get past ~18Gbps on commodity servers and ~90Gbps on high spec, carefully specced servers. I presume you find the same?





A twitch 720p stream is only 4 Mbps. 1080p? 6-8 Mbps

So if you've got ~18 Gbps of upload bandwidth you're ready for 10,000-20,000 viewers.


With how ubiquitous gigabit symmetric is becoming, I wonder if you could even do P2P nowadays.

Assuming a single gigabit symmetric connection could dedicate at most 100mb of upload bandwidth, you'd need one such viewer per each 25 viewers with a worse connection. This feels achievable.

You'd have 1 server that broadcasts to at most 10K tier-1 viewers. Tier 2 viewers get 3 tier1 ips for failover, and pre-negotiate a connection with them, e.g. through STUn, to get sub-second failovers in case their primary source quits the stream. A central control plane load balances these.

With something like 15s of buffer (acceptable for a gaming stream, not so much for sports, where your neighbors might be watching on satellite and cheer), this feels achievable.


> With how ubiquitous gigabit symmetric is becoming, I wonder if you could even do P2P nowadays.

CGNAT is going to make that a hassle.


Ideally any ISP resorting to CGN would be providing IPv6 support, but Tailscale shows that nat hole-punching can work well [1]. I'm not sure if that's feasible to implement in a web browser though.

[1] https://tailscale.com/blog/how-nat-traversal-works


It can work okay, but still not perfectly. Before I asked my ISP for a static address, tailscale connections between my place and my partner's only managed to maintain a direct connection half the time. The other half of the time, they required a relay.

yep. I'm still kind of shocked at how little ipv6 has been deployed.

i'm so effing tired of NAT here and NAT there and NATs in between NATs. NAT complicates things for almost no reason now that ipv6 was released almost 30 years ago. Wait, what? 30 years? Now I'm VERY shocked at how little ipv6 has been deployed.


> With how ubiquitous gigabit symmetric is becoming, I wonder if you could even do P2P nowadays.

You don't even need gigabit connections to make p2p work: a video stream is usually between 1-10mbps, with which you can do p2p even with a regular connection.

(I used to work for a start-up doing p2p streaming using WebRTC in the browser, we got up to 90% efficiency on live streaming back in 2015, and 80% for VoD).

I'm still very confused that this technology hasn't become mainstream (there are privacy concerns, but that doesn't usually stop the tech market…).


In theory I think you're right, but you do need a really smart control plane. Just because a connection is fast doesn't mean it's not metered (let's say fast 5G, starlink, rural fiber) and so on.

Are all of the issues P2P brings really worth it?

I'd say this definitely opens up streaming from your desktop with 1 CPU core handling a SFU for say 100 viewers = 500Mb or from a $5/month VPS if you've not got the capacity at home. That's pretty awesome, for most people no need to use P2P.


It's not nearly as "ubiquitous" as you may think

Not sure I follow your maths there.

If we assumed an average of 6Mb per stream that's 3000 streams, practically speaking a little lower.

It's all relative I guess but it's not that high.


Multicast enters the room

Does multicast actually work from a home network to another set of homes over the internet? I thought this traffic would just get dropped by one of the hops along the way if you tried it.

https://networkengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/47994...


I think it never took off and is not supported by many if not most routers. However, it is an efficient solution for sending live-stream data over the web. I think eventually the pressure to not send packets for each consumer but at most once per port will take over and force providers to implement this or a better solution.

It won't even make it through your home "gateway", in practice it's usable at layer 2 only.

You can't multicast over the internet.

this is an outrage. i suggest we riot.

Finally



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