Post #1355476

Welcome to the @owncast community, @JenJen! Today was a great inaugural live stream and it was a lot of fun to watch. 😁 I look forward to seeing more of your streams down the line. For the nerds in chat, I figured I would share some behind the scenes details about the hosting for Jen's instance. For some background, I host my own Owncast instance as well as the @firesidefedi instance. They currently live on a powerful server using an i7-14700 CPU for transcoding. That processor can easily run one live stream, but it takes a significant amount of compute to do so. Running two live streams concurrently would push the limits on what it can support, so I simply avoid live streaming at the same time as Fireside Fedi to ensure there's always enough compute available. However, I didn't want to put such a constraint on Jen. I had to account the possibility multiple "customers" would live stream at the same time. So I decided to try something new. Behold! The attached image is where the tits and ass get drawn... Or well, where the stream gets transcoded by Owncast before being delivered to viewers. Jen's instance is the very first one I am using a GPU for, specifically the NVIDIA T400. During today's stream, it barely peaked above 10% load and the CPU was essentially idle throughout. This low-power GPU will enable me to host more instances and support more concurrent live streams while using less hardware and less power. I will eventually be migrating my own instance and Fireside Fedi over to use the GPU. There's still a lot more research, testing, and development to do, both in terms of infrastructure as this GPU does have some limits as well as Jen's wish list of stream integrations. But today was a huge success on multiple fronts.