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live-streaming

low-latency live streaming

Twitch, LL-HLS

SystemTechniques · 17Primitives · 68 live-streaming CDN and edgecloud · medium: CDNs cache content in hundreds of PoPs near users, cutting latency and egress bills; edge compute runs small code there. Bandwidth price spreads 10x between providers.›Deterministic simulation testingdistributed · medium: Run the whole system in one thread under a seeded scheduler with simulated network, disk and clock, so every failure replays from its seed.›Primary-backup replicationdistributed · medium: One node orders all writes and ships them to standbys; the acknowledgement rule (none, one, all) sets what a crash loses, and an external arbiter decides who takes over.›Adaptive bitrate streamingmedia · medium: The client fetches short HTTP segments and picks each segment's rendition from throughput estimates, buffer level, or both, trading stalls against quality and switches.›Jitter buffermedia · medium: A receiver-side buffer holds packets just long enough, a delay tracked from recent arrivals, to reorder them and hand out media at a steady rate.›Low latency hls dashmedia · medium: Partial segments, chunked CMAF, blocking playlist reload for 2-5 s latencyVideo rate controlmedia · medium: CBR/VBR/CRF rate control with VBV buffer model and lookaheadHTTP caching semanticsnetworking · low: The rules (RFC 9111) that decide whether a stored response is still fresh, and how a cheap conditional request revalidates it when it is not.›Adaptive streaming manifestsmedia · low: HLS playlists and DASH MPDs: renditions, segment timelines, codecs stringsGOP structuremedia · low: How an encoder orders I, P and B frames into groups of pictures: the knob behind seekability, compression, latency and stream switching.›Media containersmedia · low: MP4/ISO BMFF, fragmented MP4/CMAF, Matroska and MPEG-TS mux/demuxA/V sync and media clocksmedia · low: How audio and video stay lip-synced: per-stream timebases, PTS/DTS, PCR and RTCP clock mapping, and a master clock that slave streams chase by dropping, repeating or resampling.›RTP and RTCPmedia · low: RTP stamps each media packet with sequence number, media-clock timestamp and source ID; RTCP reports loss, jitter, round trip and clock mapping within a bandwidth cap.›BBR congestion controlnetworking · low: Model-based congestion control that paces at the measured bottleneck bandwidth and caps inflight near one BDP, instead of reacting to loss.›Hdr histogramdata-structures · low: Log-linear bucketed histograms with bounded relative error for latency percentilesConsistent hashingdistributed · low: Hash nodes and keys onto a ring; each key belongs to the next node clockwise, so membership changes move only about 1/n of keys.›Reliable UDPgame-networking · low: Transport over UDP: each packet carries a sequence number, an ack and a 32-bit ack history; only chosen messages are made reliable.›Process supervisionhardware-os · low: A parent process starts services, reaps their exits and restarts them under a delay and burst-limit policy, then stops them with SIGTERM before SIGKILL.›Hardware video accelerationmedia · low: GPU/ASIC encode and decode APIs (NVENC, VideoToolbox, VA-API) with zero-copy surfacesMutual TLSsecurity · low: TLS where the client also proves a certificate key, so every connection carries a verified, rotatable machine identity.›Graceful drainingsystems · low: On a termination signal, stop taking new work, finish in-flight work until a deadline, tell clients to reconnect elsewhere, then exit; clients resume from a token.›Request coalescingsystems · low: Collapse concurrent identical requests into one backend fetch (singleflight)Cooperative schedulingconcurrency · low: Green threads/coroutines yielding at await points on a user-space scheduler+ 10 more techniques+ 52 more primitives

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