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I want to implement a high performance rtsp server which is to handle vod request --- it only handles signaling request, it does not need to streaming the media file. I have accomplish a version that is written in Java basing on the Mina networking framework, and the performance seems to be not very high.

As far as I know, high performance SIP server(e.g. VoIP server) is written in C (e.g. OpenSIPS, Kamailo), should I use C or C++ for my project to get a significant performance improvement?

BTW. I found some explanation of the reason why OpenSER is written in C by its author: "On the other hand, it is the garbage collector that can cause lots of troubles when developing SIP applications in Java. Aheavily loaded server written in Java stopsworking when the garbage collector is cleaning the memory. The delay caused by the garbage collector can be even more than 10 seconds. Such delays are unacceptable" Is that a fact nowadays which mean that I should use C too?

realjin
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  • In theory, to "improve" the performance of a Java application is to create wrappers for dynamic link libraries in native OS optimized using other programming language like assembly/C/C++. This can be done using Java technology like JNI or JNA. A few projects use this approach like VLCJ (java binding to libVLC engine, a collection of GCC+ libraries and plugins used in VLC media player) – ee. Feb 15 '12 at 08:08

3 Answers3

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There are a huge number of variables here, language may not be the determining factor. Trustin Lee, the author of MINA, later created Netty, which offers very high performance indeed. Lee himself says that MINA has "relatively poor performance" as a result of the complexity of some of the features it offers being too tightly bound to the core. So you might look at Netty before completely rewriting everything.

If you're using Oracle's JVM, you're using an extremely optimized runtime system that identifies hotspots in the code (hence the name "HotSpot") and aggressively optimizes them at runtime. It's been a long time since you could say, ipso facto, that Java code would run more slowly than C code. Well-written, optimized C code probably out-performs equivalent Java code in certain select tasks, but a generalization from there is probably no longer appropriate, and of course your code has to take on several of the burdens that the JVM shoulders for you with Java. Also note that there are several things you can do to tune the JVM's garbage collector, for instance to prefer consistency and short pauses over footprint and long pauses.

Obviously C has several strengths (being close to the machine is sometimes exactly what you want), as does explicit memory management for certain tasks.

Community
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T.J. Crowder
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Have you compared your rtsp server with Wowza? Wowza is also written in Java, if your rtsp server has lower performance than Wowza, I believe you could improve its performance without changing language, otherwise, if Wowza has similar performance with your server, it indicates that Java cannot satisfy the performance requirements, maybe you should consider to use c/c++ instead.

ciphor
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I built my own RtspServer in C# and have no problem streaming to hundreds of clients.

http://net7mma.codeplex.com/

Code Project article @ http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/507218/Managed-Media-Aggregation-using-Rtsp-and-Rtp

You are more then welcome to adopt / reference the design! (Apache 2 License)

Jay
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