Hey all,
Ive been building flash sites for some time now, and feel like i have an
advanced grip on flash, php, mysql, etc, but have never used FMS yet. I have my
first client needing, i think, FMS and have a few questions of what to exect
that im getting into. Basically I'm working up a quote. The client wants a
dating type site (ie lavalife, yahoo personals, etc) and wants to have both
text and A/V chat enabled. Some time ago I checked out flash communication
server at a skim over and try to see how big a deal it is level. Now it seems
its not called FCS anymore, but FMS. I checked out the suggested hosts for
flash video streaming service but they seem to only cover streaming video, not
the back and forth interactivity that im looking for. Does anyone have any
pointers on where to go to get a quick, yet good enough overview so that I can
roughly estimate the size / cost of the project? Any suggested hosts? what kind
of stats am I looking for to ensure good quality hosting? for reference I am
looking for a setup that will hold him up to a few thousand members, likely
1-2k simultaneous A/V users at peak.

Which brings me to my next confusion. FMS seems to cap out at 100 simultaneos
connections per license, max 3 licenses, at $4.5k per license. did I read this
wrong? coulda sworn that communication server had a top license for 2k
simultaneous at a few thousand $ price which could, within the host's limits,
be extended indefinately. surely macromedia isnt limiting us to 300 sim.
connections at any given time, I cant see how that would be useful. If anyone
can give me a rough ballpark guess as to what kind of cost for license and /mo
of the host to expect it would be awesome. Anyway, thanks for the help, trying
to hash this out asap so I can get back to the client, and things always seem a
bit confusing when its a new area.

Oh, as far as learning curve, Im familiar enough with AS2 that I write my own
components and extensions. I assume this is basically an extended set of AS2
classes and that this would be something that, with a bit of playing, wouldnt
be too hard to pick up in a week or so, am I off base?

Thanks again in advance for all the help. Hope to see more of ya here soon, im
pretty excited that I may get to finally jump into this area, was getting kind
of monotonous there for a while.

One the note of the license, the model changed when FMS was released. Lots of
developers complained, and Macromedia responded by offering a license model
similar (and in fact a little better) than the FCS 1.5 license.

The FMS licese has two models:

1. 100 users / unlimited bandwidth
2. 2500 users / 25mbps max bandwidth

You can stack up to 10 licenses. After that point, it makes better financial
sense to start working with edge/origin licenses.

You can't mix the licenses. It's either all 100/unlimited, or all 2500/25

As for the "video streaming services"... that won't work for your application.
Along with the video streams, you're going to have some data (in the form of
sharedObjects) that will syncronize between the clients and the server(s).
You'll need full blown FCS/FMS for tthat, and for the volume you're talking
about, you'll want at least two (both for capacity and failover reasons).

For an application like this, much of your code is acutally going to reside on
the server. The best way for an application to be designed (imo) is to have the
sever control just about everything, and have the client simply respond to the
instructions provided by the server.

Server side actionscript is written in AS 1. Learning curve is not all that
steep for anyone with existing AS experience. The docs that come with the
developer version of FMS will show you all of the classes you'll be working
with, and how to syncronize data with clients. There are a few syntactical
differences between client side AS and server side AS, but it's farily simple
to get down. If you're a solid actionscripter, I don't see any reason why you
couldn't be up to speed in a couple of weeks.

If you really want a good crash course, pick up a copy of "Programming Flash
Communication Server" (O'Reilly)... as it's about the most comprehensive book
on the topic I've found.

wow, thanks so much, think you just cleared up a ton of stuff. As far as the
two licenses, a. if you stack the 2500/25 you get 5k/50 not 5k/25 right? is
25mbps enough for 2500 A/V chat connections at a reasonable quality/resolution?
obviously dont need huge resolution or movie quality for chat but of course I
do want it to work well and look good.

I havent seen anything about scaling liscenses, ie either free dev or 4.5k.

Some streaming servers, like vital stream, have really nice advanced admin
panels to see various usage stats. Is this either part of FMS or standard on
FMS hosts?

What type of cost range should I expect for a decent host to handle this
project up until about the point where I max out the first FMS license and need
to expand?

I have been told that there are really two steps to building a project like
this, the actual construction, which should be done on a standard $10/mo or so
basic host, perhaps with a dev license, and then the proccess of expanding it
and putting it on a FMS server to go live. To me the first part seems like all
the work, the second consisting of simply moving files to a new server, so Im
not sure why this would be an entire second stage with billing stages attached
to it. Can you suggest an information source about expanding a flash setup like
this from 10 users to 2500 and from there to 25k so that I can get a good idea
of just what to expect?

again, thanks so much for the input, its a bit of a leap in project scope here
and I want to make sure im not gonna shoot myself in the head.

Originally posted by: redboxinteractive
if you stack the 2500/25 you get 5k/50 not 5k/25 right? is 25mbps enough for
2500 A/V chat connections at a reasonable quality/resolution?


No... 25mbps wouldn't be sufficient for 2500 users chatting all at once. Let's
examine the following scenario:

Assuming only two users will participate in any given chat, we have two
streams for each user... one publishing and one recieving. You can get away
with 15kbps streams (that's what I use for my e-boardroom.net application), so
that's 30kbps per user. 2500users*30kbps = 75000kbps, or 73.25mbps. So, you'd
need 3 licenses to cover the bandwidth.


I havent seen anything about scaling liscenses, ie either free dev or 4.5k.


For pricing on origin/edge licenses (the ones that scale across servers), you
need to contact Macromedia directly. Since they don't list that info on their
site, I don't want to publish it here.


Some streaming servers, like vital stream, have really nice advanced admin
panels to see various usage stats. Is this either part of FMS or standard on
FMS hosts?


FMS has logging capabilites, and also has an admin console thatallow you to
monitor application performance in real time.


What type of cost range should I expect for a decent host to handle this
project up until about the point where I max out the first FMS license and need
to expand?


For the kind of volume you're talking about, it would be more cost effective
to get your own server(s) and your own FMS license(s). You can get a dual Xeon
machine with everything you need for about 300 a month, including 1500gb+ of
bandwidth depending on the provider/package you choose.


I have been told that there are really two steps to building a project like
this, the actual construction, which should be done on a standard $10/mo or so
basic host, perhaps with a dev license, and then the proccess of expanding it
and putting it on a FMS server to go live. To me the first part seems like all
the work, the second consisting of simply moving files to a new server, so Im
not sure why this would be an entire second stage with billing stages attached
to it. Can you suggest an information source about expanding a flash setup like
this from 10 users to 2500 and from there to 25k so that I can get a good idea
of just what to expect?


There are two sides to the application: a webserver and the FSC/FMS server.
The webserver serves the .swf files, and the .swf file makes the connection to
the FMS server from the client side.

HTTP and FMS don't have to be on the same physical server, and you can connect
to any FMS server from any .swf, regardless of where the .swf is served from.
The flashplayer's sandbox security does not apply to connections made to an FMS
server, so you don't have to worry about domain conflicts or special
permissions for a given domain.

While you're building and testing your applications, you can use the dev
edition, and you can install it on any windows or linux machine you have access
to. I find it to be helpful to have a local server on my network for
development. What you can't do is install FMS on a shared http hosting account.
You need root server access, and shared hosts generally don't allow
accountholders to install software. As I mentioned before, with the volume
you're talking about, you'd be better off with a couple of dedicated servers.
This would solve the problem of shared hosting limitations, as you would have
total access to (and conrtrol of) your servers.

As far as planning for scaling up in the future, I prefer to handle that with
the structure of the applications I build, rather than relying on the server
software to do it. You can develop master/child relationships between separate
instances of applications, and that allows you to scale a single application
across multiple servers fairly easily.


again, thanks so much for the input, its a bit of a leap in project scope here
and I want to make sure im not gonna shoot myself in the head.


It's a big step, but like I said before, if you have a solid understanding of
actionscript the coding side of things should come fairly naturally. That being
said, the application you are describing is going to require more than just a
simple chat application, as you're going to have a lot of users, and you're
going to need to put some fairly robust access control and security measures in
place. The FMs side of things needs it's own security scheme, and (imo) that's
something that shouldstart at the application level.

Since this is for a paying client and you're just getting your feet wet, you
might want to hire an expirienced FCS/FMS developer as either a consultant, or
to handle the FCS programming side of the application. There are a lot of
things to consider that don't come up in other sorts of flash development, and
I've seen a fair number of developers coming to the end of a project and fiding
that they overlooked something critical (like security... it always seems to be
security). I've seen a lot of cases where the flaw was such that the entire
application had to be restructured to fix the problem (I've taken over quite a
few projects like this).

If you haven't found it yet... another good forum on the topic is
http://flashcomguru.com . Lots of heplful people there, and lots of good
resources that you won't find in the FMS docs.