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Jonathan Henson
Asked: 2012-08-30 10:58:00 +0800 CST

multicast streaming, too much network traffic?

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I am thinking of switching our streaming servers to use multicasting instead of registering multiple clients and duplicating the streams manually on the server. It seems to work very well. However, I did notice that on the packet capture, when a server is multicasting the packets show up on every node, even those that have not subscribed to the stream. Is this the way it is supposed to function? Will this cause network problems if I have several of these servers sending out a multicast stream simultaneously(to different addresses obviously)?

thanks!

networking

1 Answers

  1. Multicast, by it's nature, is broadcast based in the sense that the multicast stream is flooded to all switch ports in the same VLAN or broadcast domain. The hosts that have subscribed to and are interested in that stream will then listen to that stream, all other hosts ignoring it. The way to "solve" this "broadcast problem" is to configure IGMP snooping.

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