Testing how Smooth Streaming chokes
Just for fun, I tested Big Buck Bunny being served through IIS Media Services from the local disk, running on an Amazon EC2 Micro instance (the smallest available). This is a fairly lightweight server, i.e. something you would never want to run in a production environment. Consider this the streaming equivalent of “Will it Blend?”…
The results are in – when it’s going well, it’s surprisingly great, and when it’s not going well, it’s terrible. 
Total Chunks: 2691
Chunks Tested: 2691
Manifest Download Time: 310ms
Avg Video Chunk Response Time: 357ms
Avg Audio Chunk Response Time: 61msExcellent Chunks: 590 (21.92%)
Good Chunks: 1821 (67.67%)
Warning Chunks: 68 (2.53%)
Degraded Chunks: 6 (0.22%)
Poor Chunks: 206 (7.66%)Stream 0: video, 2962kbps, 2056kbps, 1427kbps, 991kbps, 688kbps, 477kbps, 331kbps, 230kbps
Stream 1: audio, 128kbps
Things go OK around 89% of the time. But when they don’t, it crashes and burns…
Yikes. You can almost feel the Silverlight players freaking out.
