How configure to handle *30 simultaneous clients* for 2 hours? (online class!)

Question

motion worked great. I love it. I just had a question about optimization. I'd like to use it to teach an online class and have 30 remote clients see my face for 2 hours. I have a laptop with a DSL connection that has 512kpbs max upload rate. I noticed that even having 2 simultaneous clients bogs down my laptop! Someone mentioned using a "Squid cache" but I have no experience with that. I don't know if that will scale to 30 clients. I also have another server I can use to assist but don't know how to outsource the work to that remote server.

I have no experience scaling video to so many clients. Any advice you have would be greatly appreciated.

Hopefully I won't need to purchase 10 remote servers to do this?

Thanks in advance.

Dr. Chris Seberino

P.S. I tried to lower quality of video in my motion.conf below but I doubt that is enough to solve this problem. Any motion.conf advice also appreciated.

My motion.conf:

<VERBATIM>
daemon on
process_id_file /var/run/motion.pid
setup_mode off
videodevice /dev/video0
width 320
height 240
framerate 100
threshold 0
noise_level 0
despeckle EedDl
gap 4000
quality 100
ffmpeg_cap_new on
ffmpeg_variable_bitrate 1
text_right
webcam_port 8081
webcam_quality 50
webcam_maxrate 1
webcam_localhost on
</VERBATIM>

Environment

Motion version:	3.2.11.1
ffmpeg version:	3:0.svn20090303-1ubuntu6
Libraries:	ffmpeg, mysql
Server OS:	Ubuntu 9.04, kernel 2.6.28-17-generic

-- ChristianSeberino - 07 Jan 2010

Answer

Do you need motion detection or only a streaming solution ?!

If you need only a streaming solution probably is not a good idea use motion but you can use with help of relay :

you ---> your laptop running motion <--------> other computer running apache with mjpegProxyGrab <--- DSL router ---> Clients 

http://www.lavrsen.dk/foswiki/bin/view/Motion/MjpegProxyGrab

You should remove ( disable ) all motion detection , image recording, video recording : despeckle , ffmpeg_cap_new off , output_normal off

Increase webcam_maxrate to 10 or so and you have to disable motion detection from web ui or console :



wget http://127.0.0.1:8080/0/detection/pause

-- AngelCarpintero - 09 Jan 2010