On the request of many customers and out of our own curiosity we developed a methodology for measuring the performance of a media stream. We used this to compare MistServer with other commonly used media servers. Wowza represents the dedicated media servers with great capabilities and functionality, Nginx represents the web servers with efficiency and ease of use.

We have found that compared to other media servers we are able to handle bandwidth more efficient. Compared to both Wowza and Nginx, MistServer adapts to the user profile and makes sure to only send the data the user requests instead of the entire file. This means MistServer could save you up to 90% on bandwidth costs depending on user profile compared to most other media servers!
Furthermore, MistServer allows up to four times more concurrent viewers from one server compared to Wowza, saves at least 80% on your CPU usage and saves at least 75% on your memory usage. Compared to the efficient Nginx web server, MistServer performs near equal in concurrent viewers, CPU usage and memory costs.

We are proud to share these results as it places MistServer as the media server that combines the capabilities and functionality of a dedicated media server with the efficiency and ease of use of a web server and also shows MistServer has the most efficient way to handle bandwidth costs up to date! If you are interested in the summary of the test results please click here. If you are interested in the full test results you can download our white paper featuring the full test report here. We can imagine you would want to run these stress and performance tests on your own platform and compare the results and we are prepared to share our test software on request.

To sum it up:

• MistServer saves you up to 90% on bandwidth compared to both Wowza and Nginx
• MistServer allows up to four times more concurrent viewers compared to Wowza
• MistServer saves you at least 80% in CPU usage compared to Wowza
• MistServer saves you at least 75% on your memory compared to Wowza
• MistServer has comparable results to Nginx on concurrent viewers, CPU and memory usage