How many hd300's can a server support?

[ANT]

Hi everyone, I'm thinking of using sagetv in a 16 bed assisted living facility and cutting down the ui to make it dead simple and to make sure that no one can mess with the settings. How many simultaneous connections have people had running on a server at once. Is this even practical. I imagine up to ten connections at once might be a possibility.

Also, how reliable are the hd300's both in terms of hardware reliability as well as software?

Thanks for your replies ahead of time.

[Ericft]

one of the limitations you will face is simultaneous livetv watching...the issue being that you will need one tuner for each stream of videos that is being watched...so potentially you would need 16 tuners if every patient is watching something different at the same time!!!
hardware/software reliability is very good even with beta releases and v7 should be going gold any time soon...

[PiX64]

That still doesn't answer the core question of what is the physcial limitation if any of hd300 to server. is there a physical RAM limitation on the server side that the server will just crap out and run horribly if there are 2 to many hd300's connected?

with sage being only 32 bit i would be willing to bet that there is a server to hd300 limitation out there.

I have 3 hd300's running with 1 client on my setup and when i have all 3 going doing something, my RAM usage gets up to 1GB if not a little more...

Opus or someone more knowledgeable have any idea on this?

[GKusnick]

Extenders run everything except media playback on the server, so memory and CPU demands grow linearly with the number of viewing stations. There is no fixed limit on the number of extenders that can connect, but once you exceed the physical memory limits of your server, performance is going to go downhill quickly.

By contrast, lightweight PC clients running SageTV Client do all processing locally, so the only load they put on the server is for database and file system access. This means higher equipment cost per client, but scales much better to large installations than using extenders.

[MattHelm]

Originally Posted by ANT

Hi everyone, I'm thinking of using sagetv in a 16 bed assisted living facility and cutting down the ui to make it dead simple and to make sure that no one can mess with the settings. How many simultaneous connections have people had running on a server at once. Is this even practical. I imagine up to ten connections at once might be a possibility.

Also, how reliable are the hd300's both in terms of hardware reliability as well as software?

Thanks for your replies ahead of time.

Are you going to be running HD and SD video? Lots of HD would require about 2-4 times the bandwidth.

Your biggest limit on any modern server is going to be drive bandwidth and network bandwidth. CPU and memory are almost non-question, as with a extender, only the UI is driven by the server, and if you are cutting it down, I'd say any newer reasonably fast CPU can handle 16 extenders.

For the network bandwidth issue, you can easily add network cards and branch the networks so no card handles more than 4 or 8 extenders.

For the drive bandwidth issue, you better talk to someone else. I'm not that up on what would work best with multi-steams from a single storage device (worse case, if all 16 users wanted to watch 1 show, but at different times in that show).

[Fuzzy]

The real limit may actually be the fact that all extenders, AND the server itself, all reside in a single JVM heap - which appears to be somehow limited around 1.5GB. So even throwing 8GB or RAM in the server, isn't going to help issues. I do wish each context was it's own process, but that currently is not the case. Keeping your slimmed down UI very simple may help with the heap usage, but at some point, that java limit is going to get you.

[ANT]

Thanks everyone, that's helpful. Basically it sounds like it may work, but it would really be pushing the limits of the software (ie. the 1.5GB limit). I wonder what the largest system concurrently running is right now?

Perhaps the answer would be just to run two servers with each handling eight extenders. Does anyone see any problem with that? I could have a NAS with some media so I don't have to duplicate, but if there's anything that is used often it may have to be copied on each server.

[Nelbert]

Unless somebody has a large collection of Extenders, Sage would be the best people to answer as they'll have enough hardware. Unfortunately it's not as simple as saying 1 extender needs this much memory so 16 need 16 times more. The number will depend both on the server itself and what the JVM does with memory on that server.
A 32 bit JVM on Windows/Linux has always had a limit of 1.4Gb-1.6Gb, using a 64 bit OS makes no different if the JVM is 32 bit. As you reach this limit under load Java garbage collection starts falling apart, and the JVM usually behaves horribly and accelerates it's own demise.

I'd go with 2 or 3 SageTV servers and also probably ignore the server/nas hardware aimed at the home/soho market.
Setting 3 servers should give you the headroom to attach a servers worth of extenders to the 2 remaining servers when one fails.

With 16 clients, I wouldn't bother with the 4/5 disk nas boxes. You need something that can take a decent number of disks. More disks means faster access until you hit the network/disk controller bottlenecks.

You haven't really said what you are trying to provide.
1) Are you wanting to stream live and recorded tv
2) allow people to make recordings?
3) Should recordings be private?
4) Where would recordings be stored?
5) What are your TV sources? How many channels?
6) What about DVD/Blu-Ray Movies?
7) Pictures?
8) Music?
9) Radio?
10) Can they use their own media?
11) How robust a service does it need to be? What happens if it goes off for an hour, somebody tries to record and it doesn't, wants to watch a movie and can't?

Have you dropped Sage an email?

As much as I like SageTV and understand why you would want to use it, I'd also look at a multicast system with media clients rather than a server(s) with extenders. Less moving parts. Something possibly like the Reel Multimedia NetCeiver/NetClient style system.

[MrD]

Originally Posted by ANT

Hi everyone, I'm thinking of using sagetv in a 16 bed assisted living facility and cutting down the ui to make it dead simple and to make sure that no one can mess with the settings. How many simultaneous connections have people had running on a server at once. Is this even practical. I imagine up to ten connections at once might be a possibility.

Also, how reliable are the hd300's both in terms of hardware reliability as well as software?

Thanks for your replies ahead of time.

I have had 2 HD100s, 1 HD300, and 2 PCs going at once, but I only capture 2 live streams.

I do not think 16 extenders is going to push the server limits on the JVM, but it could test your network design if it is 100Mb/s at the server.

[metzz71]

I have Win7 x64 with 4gb ram and q9550 cpu. I have HD300 as the primary extender and 2 HD200's. When I turn on the third extender, it is VERY SLOW. hardly usable. With two extenders running (1 hd300 and 1 hd200), RAM is 2.3gb of the 4 and cpu is 10%. Seems like i could handle the third easily. Thoughts?

[wayner]

I have 5 extenders and it is rare to be using them all simultaneously but I know that I have been using at least three simultaneously playing back video without issues.

[gibsonpa]

FWIW, I have four HD100's and have all running on occasion with no issues.

[bjkiller]

i have 8 clients... 2x HD300, 3xHD200,3xPC Clients.
i use dvbe4sage that allow me use concurrency with LiveTV, i have 3x DVBS2 tunners for YES DVBS and 3x DVBS2 tunners for Platforma HD, every provider has 10 virtual tunners from dvbe4sage.
i have server with mobile cpu(for cooling proposes), and 3GB RAM running Windows XP embedded.
i think for more clients you need more RAM, with 64bit Windows.

[metzz71]

so we are in agreement that I should not have problems with 3 extenders at the same time?

[paulbeers]

Originally Posted by metzz71

so we are in agreement that I should not have problems with 3 extenders at the same time?

Yes I've regularly had 3 extenders going (I have a total of 6 on my network at all times, but I've never had more than 3 doing playback at any given time). Have you upped your java heap on your server?

[metzz71]

Java heap?

[paulbeers]

Do a quick search.... It could make a world of difference....

[metzz71]

Thanks, all is well now.

[will]

Originally Posted by bjkiller

i think for more clients you need more RAM, with 64bit Windows.

I know this is an old thread but when I came across this it made me wonder, is Sage a 32 or 64 bit application (or does it not matter with Java based apps)?

If Sage is 32 bit based then you can put it on a server with 100 GB of RAM and Sage will still only have access to 2 GB.

[Fuzzy]

Originally Posted by will

I know this is an old thread but when I came across this it made me wonder, is Sage a 32 or 64 bit application (or does it not matter with Java based apps)?

If Sage is 32 bit based then you can put it on a server with 100 GB of RAM and Sage will still only have access to 2 GB.

Its 32 bit Java, and as such, the heap is limited to about 1.5gb. In hindsight, it would have been nice if the server spawned a new process for each connected extender, but hat would use a lot more ram overall, especially since it couldn't share resources between extenders.