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How large can Tvheadend scale to?

Added by roger this over 12 years ago

Could this system work in a Hotel with 100+ rooms connected to the one server at a time? Could it work on a larger scale over a WAN where the there would be a wireless speed limit?

I have checked the documentation\forum but I could find any information on this.

I did a ruff count of the transponders on 28.2E and there where 85 transponders. So (corrected me if I'm wrong) I would need 85 sat cards with links straight to the dish.

Is there a limit to the amount of cards possible with TVHeadEnd?
How many concurrent connections can be connected to TVHeadEnd at one time?

Sorry for all the questions!


Replies (3)

RE: How large can Tvheadend scale to? - Added by Hein Rigolo over 12 years ago

first ... do the math on bandwith:

100+ rooms .. each watching a High Def channel for 12Mbps each. So that would require at least 1200Mbps network connection to your single server. Then the CPU power required to decode these channels will require you to have a lot of CPU power, so a single core processor would not be enough.

Then there are the limitation on the sat cards: Which server has enough bandwidth and slots for 85 PCI cards? or USB bandwidth?
Then there is the Linux Kernel limitations on DVB cards. Currently that is set to 8, but can be changed by compiling a custom kernel.

Concurrent connections are limited by hardware ...

So ... I do not think it is feasible to use tvheadend "out of the box" for such an installation. Also, what kind of clients would you put in each room? and what is the cost for those?

Hein

RE: How large can Tvheadend scale to? - Added by Tomas Matejicek over 12 years ago

I am using tvheadend to record entire multiplex on just three DVB-T frequencies, and the thing crashes once per day due to malloc() returning NULL. On the other hand I'm using tvheadend on different computer to occasionally record just one DVB-S channel, few hours per day, and this works for months without crashes. So I assume my crashes are related to the "heavy" usage on my first computer. If you wish to capture 85 cards, you may hit the crash even 30 times faster than me :)

RE: How large can Tvheadend scale to? - Added by Szymon Życińśki over 12 years ago

Hein Rigolo wrote:

first ... do the math on bandwith:

100+ rooms .. each watching a High Def channel for 12Mbps each. So that would require at least 1200Mbps network connection to your single server. Then the CPU power required to decode these channels will require you to have a lot of CPU power, so a single core processor would not be enough.

Then there are the limitation on the sat cards: Which server has enough bandwidth and slots for 85 PCI cards? or USB bandwidth?
Then there is the Linux Kernel limitations on DVB cards. Currently that is set to 8, but can be changed by compiling a custom kernel.

Concurrent connections are limited by hardware ...

So ... I do not think it is feasible to use tvheadend "out of the box" for such an installation. Also, what kind of clients would you put in each room? and what is the cost for those?

Hein

So it would be better to use mumudvb with multicast transmision. It will take about 21Mb/s for entire dvb-t mux. You can use even thousand of clients .... it doesn't metter.

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