IPTV load balancers, explained.
The main server runs the panel and pulls your channels. Load balancers carry the viewers. Here is how they work in streamars, how to add one and how many you need.
What a load balancer does.
One pull per channel, however many servers
The main server pulls each channel from its source once. Load balancers take the channel from the main server, or from another load balancer above them, so adding servers adds no upstream connections.
Viewers go to the right server
A player asks the main server for a channel and is redirected to a load balancer. The choice follows the viewer's country and ISP where you set it, and the same session stays on the same server.
Only healthy servers get viewers
Load balancers report in all the time. Viewers are sent only to servers that are online, and a server you take down for maintenance is drained first.
Movies close to the viewer
Load balancers can serve movies and series too: from a cache they fill from the main server, or from copies placed on their own disks.
Add one from the panel.
No terminal on the new server. Give the panel an SSH login and it does the install, in four steps.
Prepare a blank server
Install Ubuntu 22.04, 24.04 or Debian 12 on a server with the same CPU architecture as the main server. Docker is not needed on it.
Add it in the panel
Open Servers, choose Add edge and enter the server's SSH address with a password or key. Confirm its host key, which the panel pins.
Let the pre-checks run
The panel checks the OS, ports, disk and the route back to the main server, and changes nothing until they pass.
Install and join
The install runs in the background with a live log. When it finishes, the load balancer joins and starts taking viewers.
What a load balancer needs
- A blank Ubuntu 22.04, 24.04 or Debian 12 server
- The same CPU architecture as the main server
- Ports 80 and 443 free for viewers
- Ports 9090, 9091 and 6390 on the main server reachable from it
- A DNS name for HTTPS, or a bare IP for plain HTTP
Your SSH login stays with you
The password or key is held in memory for the install only. It is never written to the database, a log or the audit trail.
The main server itself is set up with one command. See the installation guide.
How many do you need?
Start from bandwidth, not CPU. Every viewer of a live channel costs that channel's bitrate on the server they watch from: 500 viewers of a 2.5 Mbit/s channel need about 1.25 Gbit/s of upload.
For CPU and memory, one data point from our benchmark: a 4 vCPU, 8 GB server served 500 live TS viewers with about 1.0 GB of memory and a CPU peak of 156% out of 400%.
So size each load balancer by the network port you can buy, keep one spare so you can drain a server without crowding the rest, and add servers by region if your viewers are spread out.
Updated one by one.
Load balancers are updated from the same page as the main server. Each one is drained, updated and checked before the next starts, and one that fails its health checks goes back to the previous release.
Unlimited load balancers.
One plan, €49 a month for your whole panel, with as many load balancers as you join to it. Try it free for 14 days.