Trying to find lowest latency setting for FMS 3.0 live streaming app

Question

Hi,
I work for a technology company in the agricultural industry,
and we recently bought Adobe FMS 3.0 for live streaming of an
online auction application. Initially the tests were ok, but the
stream latency is becoming a real issue. It starts at around 1s
delay, which is barely acceptable, but an hour into the sale it
stretches to 2-3s, and more. This is becoming a real deal breaker
for the Flash solution that looked very promising at the beginning.
We need to find the absolute lowest latency setting for the
live streaming application supplied with FMS3.0.
Low latency (1s max) and stable latency has highest priority,
more important than picture quality or uninterrupted streaming.
How can we achieve this? Are there any settings where I can
tweak the stream latency?
I am not a Flash expert, but I can find and modify the
configuration files on the FMS Windows 2003 server.
Any help would be immensely appreciated.

Answer 1

On server side:
FMS installs itself with default configurations optimized for
Max CPU efficiency. Reducing/shutting-off FMS publisher queues
using Application.xml config should help in removing the delay that
you experienced.
<Application>
<StreamManager>
<Live>
<Queue enabled="true">
</Queue>
</Live>
</StreamManager>
</Application>
Changing default setting to <Queue enabled="false">
disables live publisher queues & aggregate messages ad
therefore "the delay". (the delay should be reduced to <100 ms
for a perfect kind of network or LAN)
--> On client side: Do NOT use NetStream.setBufferTime API
at all ! i.e. do not set any buffer on client side.; Flash player
(upto 10, the current version) would try its best to keep the
buffer around 0.1 seconds, which is the default value.
OmicronPersei8,
Which publisher are you using to publish the live stream?
Sometimes , it is possible that a some fault at stream publisher
may make buffer at flash player grow.
I hope this would help !