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So I've been evaluating methods of HTTP Adaptive Streaming - namely Adobe HTTP Dynamic Streaming (HDS) and Apple HTTP Live Streaming (HLS).
The implementation of HDS seemed ugly and inefficient to me when I first learnt about it, and I thought it looked like it would not scale well. The main reason for this is that for every request, for every fragment of a movie, the origin must look up an index for that movie, and use information so-gained to open a media file (.f4v) and extract a byte range from it - seems like quite a bit of cpu, memory and io overhead right, especially compared to "just be a stupid web server and serve the file".
I guess how often unique content is requested from an edge depends on things like how deep your edge caches are, entire size of your library etc, but it's reasonable to assume that often the exact requested fragment will not be cached on the Edge, which will have to ask the Origin.
So in order to actually test my suspicion (hey, perhaps it actually doesn't matter; perhaps the architecture actually scales OK) - today I've been benchmarking on a dev machine, to get an idea of the overhead and efficiency of the Apache module for HDS.
Via Nicolas Weil, Ludovic Bostral
