Hardware Utilization

Reduce your framerate

The fewer frames of video that needs to be processed result in less hardware resources that will be used to process them. You can reduce both the framerate of what you send to Owncast and the framerate sent out to the viewers.

Drawback: Reducing the framerate may visibly decrease the quality of your stream for some content.

Reduce the amount of hardware (CPU or GPU) allocated in the video settings

Each video output variant has a certain amount of hardware allocated based on the video configuration. Reducing this value can greatly free up the amount of server resources being utilized.

Drawback: The less hardware time you allocate to video encoding the worse quality the output will be. Lower settings are also less efficient when it comes to file size, possibly leading to larger video sizes that your viewers have to download that result in buffering for some.

Reduce the number of stream output variants you offer

Each stream output variant configuration results in more hardware utilization.

Drawback: As a streamer you'll want to offer as many different stream qualities as you can so people in all locations and network conditions can enjoy your content. Removing stream options may decrease the availability of your stream for some with slower networks, leading to buffering.

Match your highest output quality

One easy optimization for CPU usage is to make sure your inbound video matches your highest output quality.

The highest bitrate, resolution and framerate quality you have configured in Owncast to offer your viewers should match what you're sending Owncast in your broadcasting software to reduce the amount of extra CPU work it needs to do. Start with your highest quality matching your broadcasting software and then go from there. Lower qualities, of course, should be offered for people with slower network connections or are geographically distant.

Experiment with Passthrough Mode

Passthrough mode tells Owncast to send your broadcaster's video straight through without re-encoding it. Because the server skips encoding entirely, hardware usage drops to almost nothing. This is the single biggest reduction you can make if your server simply cannot keep up. See video passthrough for how to enable it.

Drawback: With passthrough you can no longer offer multiple quality options, so viewers on slower connections have no lower-quality stream to fall back to. Passthrough can also increase latency, and in some environments it produces video that not all players can handle.

If you are running on physical hardware, try hardware acceleration

Note: Most people will not be able to take advantage of this.

If you have access to a physical CPU that supports video encoding, or a GPU with a dedicated encoding chipset you can greatly improve your performance. Read more about what hardware is supported.

Drawback: This will not be available to most people unless you have access to physical hardware that supports accelerated video encoding.

Move to a more powerful server

If you find you're unable to configure your Owncast instance to support the number of output variants and the framerate and quality you desire you may simply have to move to a server that can handle the load with more CPU resources.

If you're on a hosted VPS you may be able to change your server with one that has more CPU resources available.

Read more

You can't be told exactly how much CPU you need, or what server or environment is going to serve you best. But read the Resources and Requirements document to understand more.