TheLostOne's questions

I'm on CentOs 7.2 with PHP 5.4.16.

I'd like to update to PHP 5.6.x or maybe even to PHP 7.0.x if it's safe to do.

What are the steps to safely switch to a newer PHP version?

These are PHP related installed packages:

php.x86_64                       5.4.16-36.el7_1                       @updates 
php-bcmath.x86_64                5.4.16-36.el7_1                       @updates 
php-cli.x86_64                   5.4.16-36.el7_1                       @updates 
php-common.x86_64                5.4.16-36.el7_1                       @updates 
php-fpm.x86_64                   5.4.16-36.el7_1                       @updates 
php-gd.x86_64                    5.4.16-36.el7_1                       @updates 
php-intl.x86_64                  5.4.16-36.el7_1                       @updates 
php-mbstring.x86_64              5.4.16-36.el7_1                       @updates 
php-mysql.x86_64                 5.4.16-36.el7_1                       @updates 
php-pdo.x86_64                   5.4.16-36.el7_1                       @updates 
php-pear.noarch                  1:1.9.4-21.el7                        @base    
php-process.x86_64               5.4.16-36.el7_1                       @updates 
php-xml.x86_64                   5.4.16-36.el7_1                       @updates

During live streams some viewers experiencing problems with the stream like dropouts and artifacts although they have a 100MBit line what makes me assume the problems are caused by packet loss.

Could a VPN to the streaming source network improve the connection?

Probably not since the packets still can choose their routes through the net and can get lost on the way, right?

I've played around with the ipfw command on a Mac and tried to limit the bandwidth to 1MBit/s.

sudo ipfw add pipe 1 ip from any to me
sudo ipfw pipe 1 config bw 1MBit/s

These are the statements I'm using. ipfw indeed limits the bandwidth drastically but according to speedtest.net only to ~7.7 Mbps on a 100 Mbps line. With a restriction to 3MBit/s the effective download is ~23.13 Mbps. Apparently the ipfw always uses a factor ~7.7 of the given limit. With a limit of 4 Mbps the effective speed is ~30,84 Mbps, with 8 Mbps it's ~61.6 Mbps and so on...

Anyone knows why this is the reason? Is it a bug or do I use the statement wrong?

Thank you