Room with a thousand viewers

[Former Community Member]

Hello,

We will use our LCCS application in a relatively big application next week, and I'm seeking advice to minimize application and network problems during the event.

Have you any experience with an LCCS application which is used by hundreds of users at the same time? (I mean, only one room)

For example,

- Should I turn peer assisted networking on, or not? How much difference it can make?

- There will be only one publisher in the room. He or she will send A/V data only to LCCS servers, right? Everybody else will download from LCCS? (This may be related to the first question)

Please feel free to add your comments, advice or questions.

[Raff_]

Well, tuning p2p on will reduce network traffic to our servers and reduce your costs. But you should make sure you can use p2p for your clients (if not we fall back to client-server mode, but the clients will experience a longer delay when connecting).

One thing to consider is configure your clients to use anonymous presence. This will disable the roster (assuming you don’t want all clients to know about each other) and reduce usage and activity related to every client telling each other when they go online/offline.

We should have an example for this in the sampleApps, but maybe Arun can chip in and give you a quick rundown of the feature.

[Former Community Member]

Raff,

Anonymous presence is a great idea. You're right, we don't want users to know about each other at all. But, the catch is, we also want them to ask questions by using the Chat Poll. I think we couldn't identify people from each other in this mode?

We're planning to have each user at least Flash Player 10.3.108. Does this version meet the requirements for P2P? Or should we increase this minimum? And, P2P doesn't cause any problems with recording right?

[Raff_]

You should still be able to chat with the host (again, Arun can explain how).

Regarding recording, currently we don’t support recording with P2P so when you start a recording the connection switch to hub&spoke (so, don’t bother trying to enable p2p if that’s your case)

[aponnusa]

Hi,

Yep Anonymous presence would really help your use case. Rooms that use this feature, and users in such a room would still be able to chat.

The moment some one in your room does something, his presence is notified to everyone else. So in short, all active people are added to the roster. We have ensured this to be a seamless process. As each user becomes active or tries to be active, his information is shared across the room.

Although we dont have a sample app, enabling anonymous presence is easy. You can enable it on DevConsole or by calling the API UserManager.anonymousPresence. You can test if your app works in this mode.

Thanks

Arun

[Former Community Member]

So, I realize anonymous users will be able to chat. But I forgot to mention in my previous post, that the publisher will need to know who asks the question. Currently I'm taking names of users before they enter the room, maybe I can pass it to the SWF, and prepend it to every chat message? So it would go like this:

Anonymous (12:00): John Motson says... Hi, this is a test message.

Thank you very much for the advice.

By the way, what quality settings would you suggest for webcam and screen sharing components?

[davisballen]

Hi Raff,

Would you mind elaborating on the fallback from p2p to hub and spoke? For some reason, I thought I'd read somewhere that if but a single client did was not using p2p, it would switch back to hub and spoke. Is this the case?

Will enabling p2p cause a noticeable drop in the quality or the framerate of the video that client's receive? (or, indeed, will it be better than hub and spoke at very high user counts?)

Thanks,

Davis

[aponnusa]

Hi,

Publisher would know about the user, who would be sending the message or asking the question.

So what would happen is, as the user tries to type something in the chat pod/app, the users info is broadcasted across the room. So by the time, the user asks the question, everyone would know about the user. Hope this clarifies and suits your scenario.

Answering the other question by Davis,

Yes even if one of your clients doesnt support p2p (firewall or lower FlashPlayer version), the streams switch back to hub and spoke. And;

P2P doesnt correlate to poor quality, infact it might be better than hub and spoke given the right circumstances. So you should infact see better quality in P2P mode.

Thanks

Arun