This article continues the series of articles on load tests. Today we will analyze the testing methodology and answer the question: "How many IP cameras can be connected to a WebRTC server?"

Do you remember how just a few years ago it was a disaster to lose a camera at the end of a vacation? All memorable pictures and videos then disappeared along with the lost device. Probably, this fact prompted the great minds to invent cloud storage, so that the safety of records no longer depends on the presence of the devices on which these records are made.

We continue to review variants of load tests. In this article we will go over the testing methodology and conduct a load test that we will use to try and determine the number of users that could watch and stream at the same time, meaning the users will simultaneously publish and view the streams.

This article is a continuation of our series of write-ups about load tests for our server. We have already discussed how to compile metrics and how to use them to choose the equipment, and we also provided an overview of various load testing methods. Today we shall look at how the server handles stream mixing.

In the previous article we went over a load test whose data could be used to choose a load-appropriate server. In the course of the testing, we would publish a stream on one WCS, and we would pick up that stream several times using a second WCS. The acquired results could be used as a basis for decisions on server operability.

Some would (justly) have concerns regarding the possible biases in such a test — after all, one of our servers was used to test another one of our servers. Could it be that we were using a specially optimized code that skewed the results in our favor?

In any project, a great deal of importance is placed on the selection of server hardware and WebRTC streaming is no exception. One of the key principles of such a selection is balance – the hardware should be powerful enough to handle the streams with no drops in quality, but not too powerful so as to waste resources. So, how does one choose the right server?

Monitoring systems are a vital tool for any system administrator, because they can be used to extract specific information from services, such that:

In the comment sections of our articles about our server there are often users who say: "Why would you jump through so many hoops, when you can do the same with a single line of code in FFmpeg!?"

In this article we will once again return to the tired topic of webinars and webinar hosting tools. And no, we're not about to code a whole new system for webinar hosting – there are already plenty of those. Instead, we will talk about connecting drawing software to the webinar, so that you could manually draw and broadcast the process.

A few weeks ago we wrote an article about Docker and WebRTC servers and talked about the intricacies of launching containers. Our readers (rightly) questioned whether Docker was a suitable tool for production, for the following reasons:

The "Click to Call" button on the website is an "innovation" that has been around for about 10 years. The technologies under the hood have changed, but the principle remains the same: someone clicks on the button on the site page, then JavaScript launches and requests access to the microphone and establishes a connection to the server — WebRTC SIP gateway. Further, the first client-server leg is a browser gateway, the second leg can be arbitrarily long and through the SIP proxy chain can eventually connect to a mobile or landline phone. Thus, the browser turns, in a sense, into a softphone and becomes a full participant in VoIP telephony.

The popularity of online education is increasing every month. And since there is an increase in popularity, there is an increase in competition and an improvement in quality: many authors of online schools realized that nowadays it's not enough to just make something mediocre using the frontal camera of the iPhone 4. You need to work on the quality of the picture, sound, presentation of material, etc. Not only did the pandemic prove that you can teach salsa and even crochet online, so it also gave an excellent push to improve the materials taught + diversity in the labor market. Moms on maternity leave can rejoice - now you can truly earn a hundred thousand million per second, sitting at home.

During the lockdown, which is now weakening, then becoming more active with a vengeance, a huge number of new professions have appeared. Proficients in creating involving Instagram Stories, course producers, e-learning specialists and other unknown-before-creatures - all of them have mastered a new job that gave them the holy bread in the pandemic. Once you hire a creator of involving Instagram Stories (and let's all hope this person was teached by a professional, not a snake oil salesman), your business grows just with adding some creativity in advertising that will take the heart of even the most fastidious customer. Same works with e-learning specialists: you recruit them and they do all the important tasks from writing articles that will also help in promoting your classes to arranging lessons on your Coursera course. A complete flight of imagination: if it seems to you that some jobs don't exist, then you just don't spend enough time online. In general, online work has become popularized as never and now hardly anyone will say: "He is engaged in some kind of garbage - he makes TikToks but it would be better for him to toil at the factory!". In total, online work has become popularized as never and now hardly anyone will say: "He is engaged in some kind of garbage - he makes TikToks, but it would be better for him to toil at the factory!".

The developer or owner of a software product often faces the question of choosing a suitable location for hosting server capacity. As you know, software always meets hardware.

In the previous article we refreshed our memory of WebRTC CDN and the ways this technology helps to minimize latency for WebRTC streams. We also discussed why load balancing and autoscaling wouldn't be amiss in CDNs. Here are the main points from the article:

The modern browsers do not give users a choice between using WebRTC and not using it. And while you can playback streams using HLS or MSE, WebRTC remains the only tool for capturing camera feeds and publishing streams from a browser. The browser developers have accepted this "format" and integrated it into their products – just as they used to support the Flash Player as a plugin. The only difference is that WebRTC comes natively integrated into the browser — as code, not a plugin. If, in a few years, a new and better library for video streaming is introduced they will undoubtedly make a switch. But these days, Chrome maintains its dominance, so no contenders for WebRTC are in sight.

The vast majority of IT specialists in various fields strive to perform manually as few actions as possible. I won't be afraid of the loud words: what can be automatized, must be automatized!

Let's imagine a situation: you need to deploy a lot of servers of the same type and do it quickly. Quickly deploy, quickly undeploy. For example, to deploy test rigs for developers. When development is carried out in parallel, you may need to separate the developers, so they don't impede each other and possible errors of one of them don't block the work of the others.

There may be several ways to solve this problem:

As you know, YouTube doesn't have a feature for capturing an RTSP stream, but we would like to change this and help YouTube to make their viewers happy.

Alice is an experienced full stack developer, who is capable of writing a SAAS project framework on her favorite framework using php in a week. As for frontend, she prefers Vue.js. 

A client contacts you via Telegram, asking you to develop website that will be the meeting place for the employer and the employee to conduct an in-person interview. In-person means face-to-face, a direct video contact in real time with video and voice. «Why not use Skype?» some may ask. It just so happened that serious projects – and each startup undoubtedly considers itself a serious project – are trying to offer an internal communications service for a variety of reasons, including:

Virtual reality is on the rise these days. The equipment that was previously the exclusive preserve of crazy scientists geeks with big money from the Ministry of Defense back in the The Lawnmower Man days, is currently affordable for ordinary people; those whose pockets are empty, can assemble a VR headset from cardboard and a smartphone according to many recipes.