Why are
unicast clients experiencing excessive buffering?
You may be serving too many simultaneous connections. Due to
hardware limitations, a Windows Media server can only transmit a
limited number of streams at one time. Servers that are overloaded
will often lose data, interrupt transmissions, and drop clients.
Alternatively, you may be exceeding the bandwidth capacity of your
network. Your network may have a weak point or a failure, or it may
not have been designed to transfer the amount of data that your
clients require.
There are several ways to solve this problem. You can implement
any or all of these solutions to ease the data transfer load on
your server or network:
Set limits on your server. You can configure your server
to limit client connections and bandwidth so that the server and
network capacities are not exceeded. For more information about
setting Windows Media server limits, see Setting server limits.
Create a server cluster. You can make a group of Windows
Media servers work as one server by using server clusters. While
clients connect to the cluster using a single URL, the streaming
load is shared by all of the servers in order to reduce the load on
an individual server. For more information about server clusters,
see Performing load balancing and
clustering.
Add distribution servers. You can disperse the streaming
load over the entire network by using distribution servers at
points in the network where streaming demand tends to be highest.
This can dramatically improve streaming performance because the
distance between the server and client is often reduced. For more
information about distribution servers, see Using distribution servers.
Modify your streaming media content. You can lower the
bandwidth requirements of your content by encoding it differently.
For more information about encoding, see Understanding encoding.
Note
If you want to test how your server performs
under different client loads, you can download the Windows Media
Services Load Simulator from the Windows Media home page at the
Microsoft Web site.
Note