[VAXman(Admin)]

FYI and all concerned/interested:

The patron streams are broadcast directly from the Aural Moon streaming server. The other, non-patron streams, are handled by replication servers which connect to the streaming server encoders.

Lately, and very evident late last week (see Station News item: NETWORK NOT-WORK ISSUES), there have been some issues with packet loss on certain routing paths to the Aural Moon streaming server. I, myself, could not listen to Aural Moon even with my iTunes configured to use the maximum buffer size available. You may also have noticed an extreme number of SQL errors in the "Now Playing" window and the "Latest Music Library Update" window. These two sections of the Aural Moon web page contain data that exists ONLY on the streaming server. When you access the web page, code behind the scenes must send an SQL query to the Aural Moon streaming server to gather the information displayed in each of these two regions of the web page.

Because the Aural Moon web server must communicate with the Aural Moon streaming server for current music library information, any interruptions of service between these two machines will cause discernible problems within your browser displaying the page. I reported this to Streamguys and they claim that they have made some changes to routing; however, while it is better, it is not perfect. It's very likely that these problems have been in the system/network for some time and have only been exacerbated to severe status in recent days/weeks.

It may be that the streaming server just cannot handle the load of the many more patrons now listening to the patron streams. We may need to have the patron streams replicated by Streamguys as well. We're asking a lot of the current Aural Moon streaming server -- SAM is selecting, playing, and encoding several different stream formats and bit rates; the server is actively "screen scraping" for VNC access; MySQL is running as the database engine; IceCast is running for AAC+ streaming; and several (4 IIRC) instances of Shoutcast are running to handling MP3 streaming.