Capacity and Reliability

Use Tools → Capacity & Reliability to test playback through Engine servers.

Before You Start

• Sign in as a Full Administrator with a license that includes Capacity Assessment.
• Keep targets online with an HTTP listener and spare licensed capacity.
• Prepare an active playback User with access to the test content.
• Keep selected live Streams running throughout the test.
• Let traffic and resources recover before retesting.

Configure the Assessment

1. Select Target servers and the Playback user.
2. Select Playable resources: Streams support HLS and HTTP-TS; Movies and Series support HLS only.
3. Select HLS, HTTP-TS, or both. Both protocols share players equally.
4. Choose the HLS variant: highest, lowest, automatic, target bandwidth, or target resolution.
5. Set the Test duration, including startup, load growth, recovery, and observation.
6. Review the automatically calculated player ceiling and available capacity.

Under Advanced options:

• Leave Core Debug diagnostics Off; use Auto or Detailed for troubleshooting.
• Leave Use CDN load balancing on for normal routing, or turn it off to test each target directly.

The browser saves your settings.

Run and Monitor

Select Start assessment. Only one assessment runs at a time. Engine adjusts new players according to playback quality, resources, and licensed limits.

Run status shows each server and protocol:

If over 5% of players have frozen, Player also shows the stable-player and freeze-time percentages. Freeze time is green at zero, orange through 1%, and red above 1%.

Click a row to expand server status; click again to collapse it. Details opens player request details separately.

Changed in Engine 1.0+

Use Server load to compare playback with host resources. Same-host media traffic may not pass through the physical NIC.

Stop assessment produces a partial report, not a completed observation.

Read and Export the Result

A completed run does not prove safe capacity. Use only a validated capacity result. A paused ramp, suspended rollback, or delivery-limited result does not establish a hardware limit or a safe player count.

Open Details to compare request timing, download rate, buffer, HTTP status, and X-XAE-Error.

After the report is ready:

• Copy Report copies diagnostics. Review identifiers before sharing.
• Export PDF saves results and server-load charts. Missing measurements remain unavailable.
• Keep settings unchanged when comparing runs.

Changed in Engine 1.0+

Troubleshoot