Linux-based Streaming Media Server Performance Research And Analysis

Streaming Media is a kind of technology which transferring multi-media information through the networks in the forms of audio and video. Differing from the traditional multi-media downloading, streaming media transmission has real-time and continuous characteristics. Streaming media has a wide application terrain, such as online live broadcasting, network advertising, video program ordering, video meeting, long distance education and so on. In the Streaming Media system, streaming media server is mainly purposed to store and control streaming media data,so the rapidly developing networks TCP/IP will no longer be the main factor which limits the server's capability for the most current streaming media systems. However, with the rapidly developing streaming media technology and the approaching digitalization of world-wide broadcast. The capability of streaming media server is becoming more and more vital to the application of streaming media.Firstly, this paper studied and analyzed the key-point technologies in the streaming media application, and exactly introduced the fundamental theory, transferring technology and protocol of streaming media. Secondly, this paper analyzed several present mainstream streaming media servers and factors that influence the streaming media server's capability. Thirdly, studied and analyzed the core mechanisms of Linux, and introduced the module mechanism, the process of system call, and the solutions to adding the system call and kernel module in to Linux kernel. At last, this paper focused on the design of streaming media server based on Linux and the achieving process of the pivotal module's function. This streaming media server is designed with a modularization thought, and every module was running on an asynchronous event driven service runtime framework.Streaming media server is running on the Linux OS platform in the way of application software. When the server is running, the CPU runs on the user state. Streaming media server must call the system call to complete the I/O function, but when call the system call the CPU state changes to kernel state. The spending of CPU state changing from user state into kernel state, and then returned to the users state is equivalent to a simple CPU implementation of the 1000 general instructions. This paper is a branch of the project, the purpose of this project is putting some key modules that completing the major equipment I/O functions into the Linux kerne. We can effectively optimize the performance of streaming media server using this method.This paper is supportted by the Office of the Sichuan Provincial Science and Technology Fund. This paper has made preparatory exploration and study about how to improve the capabilities of the streaming media server, and can be referred in the further project.