Recently we have had a couple of customers who are running Carousel Players across networks (WANs) that are very sensitive to bandwidth. Carousel communicates on 2 TCP ports: 56901 for play list, settings and alert synchronization; and 80 for content synchronization.
We have made a change in Carousel 5.2.2 to limit the amount of data on the 56901 port. This change brings the the network load from an average of 50Kbps down to ~15Kpbs. While this helps, we think we can do even more optimization in the future.
The bigger part of the bandwidth equation is the port 80 data. This is where we synchronize the graphics and media files from the server to the players. These media files can be big, especially if we need to cache a video. *remember the content is cached on the player, so only first load and changes are sent across the network* Dynamic bulletins that are updated every 15 minutes are, of course, synchronized every 15 minutes. These bulletins can be between 800k and 5mb.
When synchronizing the media, the Carousel Display Engine will use two HTTP helper threads that will use all available bandwidth. This can cause havoc on slower WANs. There are two options: Create a QOS policy with your router to ensure that Carousel gets the appropriate priority on the network OR use IIS on the Carousel server to limit the bandwidth.
Setting up QOS and using your network hardware to to set the priorities of your data would be the BEST way to regulate Carousel bandwidth because it would control bandwidth on both port 80 and 56901. However, if you can’t do that here is an alternative that just regulates port 80 traffic…
The Carousel web interface is served on port 80 with Internet Information Server (IIS). We can limit the amount of bandwidth used by IIS. This will throttle the players (and any other users) to use a specified amount of bandwidth.
Note: This only works on Carousel Pro or Enterprise because IIS bandwidth throttling is only available in Windows 2003 server.
As you see here on our LAN, the display engine will use 9.5Mb per second to cache some large videos:
Now we will open the IIS configuration screen (Control Panel:Administrative Tools:Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager) on the server, get the properties for the Default Website, click the Performance tab and turn on bandwidth throttling:
And when we run the Carousel Display Engine this time we do not use as much bandwidth however, the initial load of the content takes longer:
This is an effective way to limit the large bursts of data that could happen when content on the player needs to change. The extend load times for the files will most likely not be an issue in most digital signage applications.
Carousel: Bandwidth Throttling
Recently we have had a couple of customers who are running Carousel Players across networks (WANs) that are very sensitive to bandwidth. Carousel communicates on 2 TCP ports: 56901 for play list, settings and alert synchronization; and 80 for content synchronization.
We have made a change in Carousel 5.2.2 to limit the amount of data on the 56901 port. This change brings the the network load from an average of 50Kbps down to ~15Kpbs. While this helps, we think we can do even more optimization in the future.
The bigger part of the bandwidth equation is the port 80 data. This is where we synchronize the graphics and media files from the server to the players. These media files can be big, especially if we need to cache a video. *remember the content is cached on the player, so only first load and changes are sent across the network* Dynamic bulletins that are updated every 15 minutes are, of course, synchronized every 15 minutes. These bulletins can be between 800k and 5mb.
When synchronizing the media, the Carousel Display Engine will use two HTTP helper threads that will use all available bandwidth. This can cause havoc on slower WANs. There are two options: Create a QOS policy with your router to ensure that Carousel gets the appropriate priority on the network OR use IIS on the Carousel server to limit the bandwidth.
Setting up QOS and using your network hardware to to set the priorities of your data would be the BEST way to regulate Carousel bandwidth because it would control bandwidth on both port 80 and 56901. However, if you can’t do that here is an alternative that just regulates port 80 traffic…
The Carousel web interface is served on port 80 with Internet Information Server (IIS). We can limit the amount of bandwidth used by IIS. This will throttle the players (and any other users) to use a specified amount of bandwidth.
Note: This only works on Carousel Pro or Enterprise because IIS bandwidth throttling is only available in Windows 2003 server.
As you see here on our LAN, the display engine will use 9.5Mb per second to cache some large videos:
Now we will open the IIS configuration screen (Control Panel:Administrative Tools:Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager) on the server, get the properties for the Default Website, click the Performance tab and turn on bandwidth throttling:
And when we run the Carousel Display Engine this time we do not use as much bandwidth however, the initial load of the content takes longer:
This is an effective way to limit the large bursts of data that could happen when content on the player needs to change. The extend load times for the files will most likely not be an issue in most digital signage applications.