(2015-12-01, 12:58)capedcrusader029 Wrote: 480p video as of now. What if I run a simple http web server on the pi? can it handle multiple clients(25) to download the video files?
You want 25 concurrent clients(*) to be playing video at the same time?
I'd say that sounds optimistic.
Lets say you wire the Pi to the router through ethernet. That will have a 100Mbit/s hard limit. Realistically you may get 90Mbit/s iperf rate and perhaps 80Mbit/s nfs rate.
So your 25 clients will get at most 3.2Mbit/s bitrate.
Looking at a typical 480p dvdrip file, and it's 1.5Mbit/s - so not impossible.
The Pi's ethernet goes over USB, so assuming a USB disk, you'll be sharing the USB bandwidth between disk and network.
USB bandwidth is theoretically 480Mbit/s, but realistically 240Mbit/s is the maximum achievable.
So there should be enough for disk and ethernet, alhough I'd suspect that the ethernet number may reduce a little due to the extra disk load.
Now reading 25 files at once may be an issue for the drive. Hard disks have a fairly slow seek time, so depending on how efficient the buffering/caching is, the disk may end up thrashing.
A disk with good seek time (e.g. an SSD) would be less likely to have an issue here.
The amount of data being moved around is limited, so I wouldn't expect the Pi2's CPU to be a bottleneck. It may well need careful tweaking of the web server to ensure it's working efficiently.
So, nothing immediately obvious that makes it impossible, but I wouldn't like to guarantee it. It's pretty ambitious for a Pi2, and moving to HD video certainly wouldn't be an option.
(*) If there are just 25 clients in total, and typically only a small percentage are playing video at once, then the problem becomes much easier.
