A Flix Cloud user writes:
I just did a test with the exact same video and closest settings possible and it took 33 minutes on your servers–on my servers, however, it took only 15 minutes. [...] I love the idea of Flix Cloud, but I wish it could live up to the claims it made.
He raises a good point and I’m happy to clarify our claims. The performance advantages we cite on our web site are related more to job throughput than individual job speed.
Our Flix Cloud transcoding workers (On2 Flix Engines) run on Amazon EC2 High-CPU Medium instances. These are fast virtual servers by EC2 standards but certainly not comparable to brand-new, dedicated hardware boxes.
Amazon has steadily bumped up the specs of their AMIs, and I imagine they’ll continue to do so, but what’s more important with Flix Cloud is the number of transcoders we can run at any time in EC2.
Using our correspondent’s numbers, let’s say he has 200 of these videos to encode. In Flix Cloud, he can run 200 concurrent transcodes at once instead of having to queue them up on his own server. In other words, even though each job takes 33 minutes in Flix Cloud, he can transcode all 200 files in 33 minutes (give or take a few minutes for start up, data transfer, etc.), instead of 3,000 minutes on his server as it churns through the files one at a time. This is possible because Flix Cloud will create 200 Flix Engine instances to handle all the files.
Or, let’s say he has two (very expensive) four-core servers and can therefore run eight transcoders at once. That still adds up to more 375 minutes to convert all 200 files–over 11x slower than Flix Cloud.
Flix Cloud isn’t a perfect fit for all uses cases. For a variety of reasons some customers prefer to own & operate their Flix Engines, and that’s fine with us. To encode large quantities of video, though, “renting” our stable of inexpensive Flix Engines has clear advantages in cost & speed over running a few or even a dozen dedicated boxes of your own.
We welcome all your Flix Cloud questions & comments. Just send them to support at flixcloud dot com.
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