High/mid traffic online tour advice.

  • Fellow krpanoers,

    We're about to launch a 360 tour expected to have lots of views and we're evaluating a series of hosting options in search of covering at least 30,000 views monthly (not much traffic compared to other projects but we want to be sure that the server won't slow down individual experience) where each user will need to download an average of 350mb.

    There are lots of questions in the air but one of them is how much RAM/CPU will be enough for the server to handle this project, also the issue of how many simultaneous visits will be the limit. Ideas to estimate or calculate this issues with Krpano will be highly appreciated as well as your experience with similar projects.

    Thanks! *thumbup*

    Luis

  • Unless you have some real heavy server side data processing going on, your main bottleneck with be simple network bandwidth. I assume your tour is very video heavy with an average of 350MB. Over what time span does a viewer need to obtain that amount of data?

  • Hello Timescale, this is just 360 photography but as there are lot's of panoramas in the experience we averaged a download per user of 350mb/8min visit. Indeed I don't think server side data processing is going to be demanding as krpano does everything user side, mainly it's job will be to deliver information quickly to users (do you?), I don't know how demanding can be that in terms of processor/RAM for peaks of 500/1000 simultaneous users, there's where similar experiences with this kind of projects can be pretty helpful. Out of that indeed we need to have a bandwith of at least 10TB monthly.

    Regards

  • I find 350MB for 8 minutes of a static photo panorama experience quite a lot actually. Are you sure this is the bandwidth you need per viewer?

    "10TB monthly" isn't the same as bandwidth, but rather the data-plan. Bandwidth is the max your provider can output at any given time.30K views * 350mb does equal a bit more than 10TB, but you can't assume the bandwidth requirements will be stable 24/7. If the mass of the viewers come from 1 timezone, you'll have to do that in 12 hours.

    Lets just take a 350MB per 8 minutes per user.. or roughly 40megabyte per minute per user. This would mean that, on average you need about 5mbps per user. (assuming no peaks and everything averaging out). On a 100mbit up line, this would mean you could cater roughly and optimistically 20 people at full speed, so this would be your peak number.. If you expect a peak somewhere during the day that is higher, you'll need gigabit or faster ( gigabit up-link would cater 200 people ).

    Lets assume that there are 12 active hours a day where your site if being visited and that the visits are neatly spread. 1 Month worth of half days is about 5580 times an 8 minute tour. If you have 20 people, on average, every 8 minutes, this means you can server up 111600 panorama's monthly in that timeslot. (roughly 40 TB of data)

    So, if the 350MB estimate is correct, then on average, in theory, you be able to serve up the expected amount of viewed tours on a 100mbit uplink with a 10TB cap.

    The CPU and ram are not going to be the big issue... max throughput is.

    But really, instead of trying to figure out how to server that amount of data I'd have a look at where all that bulk is going.. Are the pano images properly multi-res and compresses sensibly? Are the hotspot media elements of a suitable size and hosted correctly?

  • Hello Timescale, first of all thank you a lot for that very detailed explanation on bandwidth/data transfer for our case. I was doing some research yesterday and got to similar conclusions, but anyway it's pretty clear the way you're detailing all the process behind.

    Indeed, I just noticed BANDWITH and DATA TRANSFER are not the same although they're interchanged very frequently, in conclusion I could state that the first one sets a limit to simultaneous users and the second limits monthly visits.

    Quote

    find 350MB for 8 minutes of a static photo panorama experience quite a lot actually. Are you sure this is the bandwidth you need per viewer?


    We're using this neat Mac program "Surplusmeter" which allows to track live the actual data transfer, recently we did some tests and indeed it's a bit high, right now the calculated average is 200MB/10min, which is like 0.33MBps and in a standard 100Mbps uplink connection (12.5MBps) would allow around 37 users simultaneously on the server which is not much really, this is a critical point to check on hosting.

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    The CPU and ram are not going to be the big issue...


    This is the part which we really have no experience about, I guess there's not much demand on the server as virtual tour calculations are user side but, ¿have you experience on this? one of our current options has 4GB RAM, it's the lowest of them all but if it works it may be a nice option.

    Quote

    But really, instead of trying to figure out how to server that amount of data I'd have a look at where all that bulk is going.. Are the pano images properly multi-res and compresses sensibly? Are the hotspot media elements of a suitable size and hosted correctly?


    All tour is multires, interface images are all .png and less than 5MB, from the Surplusmeter measures it seems image transfer for VT is what is consuming all that bandwidth.

  • Things like PHP, database queries or accessing a lot of small files have a big impact on CPU and memory usage, but you'll just be serving up mostly big files which won't be massively parallel. Interface files will be loaded once.

    My dev server has no problem using most of it's bandwidth without the CPU breaking a sweat.

    I think you have a pretty good idea what you need in throughput, data-plan and storage. Just get something that is easily scalable.

  • If you want guaranteed high level of service that scales no matter what go with top tier hosting. I use Media Temple, which is excellent. If my needs were greater I would further use their distributed cloud service. I hear great things about Amazon's Cloud service as well. It is what IVRPA uses, I believe. No matter what the load these hosting solutions will handle it with ease.

    ANY cheap hosting solution, no matter what they claim, will fail you. (Lesson learned more than once.)

  • I'm in the process of looking for a hosting solution for video files for a project we're working on. What are people having success with right now for delivering video? The video size that we will be using will be 4096x2048 or greater. Is anybody additionally using any field of view rendering solutions? Thanks

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