Customizing Bandwidth Usage

brflem — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 00:27:00 GMT

First of all, apologies for not having introduced myself in my first post. My name is Bryan and I am a Program Manager Intern on the IIS team. In my "real life," I am an undergraduate student pursuing a double major in Electrical and Computer Engineering and Computer Science. I have been at Microsoft since mid-May 2007.

I have already posted about delivering on-demand media more efficiently, because users often do not watch entire videos. Download throttling for media is one of the things we are currently working on for our upcoming Media Pack.

There is also another way to limit bandwidth use in IIS. IIS6 and IIS7 allow an administrator to set a limit on the total bandwidth that can be used at the site and server levels. This existing functionality has some interesting applications, but it is not a very good solution to the media problem.

Where the existing bandwidth throttling might make sense is in a shared hosting scenario. To ensure no one site incurs heavy traffic that could use all of a server's bandwidth, you could set a bandwidth limit of 80% of that server's total bandwidth for each site on the box. That way no single site could ever be allowed to use enough bandwidth to completely choke out others.

Setting a bandwidth limit can also potentially lower bandwidth cost, if the bill is somehow based on the peak or "average peak" bandwidth used. Throttling allows an administrator to ensure that the bandwidth used never exceeds a set maximum, which can also mean that the bill will not exceed a set maximum. Setting a limit to control cost can be especially beneficial for a server that routinely sends large files to clients with very fast connections, generating very high bandwidth usage for extended periods of time.

Many folks are surprised to learn about the existing bandwidth limit feature, and I wanted to put it out into the community a little louder. In the IIS Manager, select a site or server, and then click on "Limits..." under "Configure" in the Actions panel.

Welcome to the IIS Media Blog!

brflem — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 16:06:00 GMT

Hello and welcome to the IIS Media Blog. I am very excited to be making my first post here and starting a deeper media discussion with the broader IIS community. IIS team members working on media will be posting here to talk about technologies in the pipeline and already here today that will help you better serve media content to your users.

So you may be asking yourself, "When did IIS start focusing on media delivery?" Microsoft recognized the trends in multimedia content on the internet - Web and media are becoming increasingly integrated. Today more than ever, music and videos are being served as part of websites and Web applications. Because of this convergence, and in order to build the most relevant technology possible, the Windows Media Services team has become part of the IIS team. Bill Staples announced and explained this change in this blog post. He also writes about the Windows Media Services product, which I will discuss briefly below.

There are really two options for delivering multimedia content today. For on-demand content you can use progressive download with a Web server. IIS sends the multimedia file as fast as available bandwidth allows, as it would any other file type. The client's player typically begins playing as soon as it has buffered a sufficient amount of content. However, more often than not, a visitor will only play a small portion of that downloaded content. When this happens, simple downloading is a somewhat inefficient method for serving media. It also makes little sense, in most cases, to send down data faster than the client can play it. IIS7 will address this - keep reading.

The other option for delivering media over the internet today is to use a fully featured streaming media server such as Windows Media Services (WMS). WMS has support for on-demand as well as live video streams, all of which can be delivered in a very efficient and cost-effective method. It can serve a different stream to each client and can also use multicast to broadcast a single stream to thousands of clients at once using only one stream's worth of bandwidth. WMS also ships with a number of features in the box that ensure a high quality end user experience.

Eric Woersching wrote an excellent post on using WMS, IIS7, and bit rate throttling as part of his MIX 2007 coverage, which you can check out here. As Eric noted, we are currently working on a new Media Pack that will move IIS7 beyond the simple download method for delivering on-demand content in the future. More on that coming soon. In the meantime, you can Go Live in production with the latest versions of IIS and WMS today by downloading Windows Server 2008 Beta 3, installing WMS, and signing the Go Live license.

We are looking forward to posting here often in the future!

IIS Media Delivery Blog

Customizing Bandwidth Usage

Welcome to the IIS Media Blog!