Current situation: Root access to ubuntu web server on windows azure Need to be able to query web service with a url to a video file, and then web service needs to download this video, piping it to ffmpeg to convert it, which needs to pipe back as the response from the web service Currently I have a node.js service that works fine for personal use. However this will eventually need to be scaled much much larger, to be doing this on the fly converting with lots and lots of clients requesting at a time, and I've noticed some issues with node.js in this regard: for example when it hits an error, the whole service goes down and then restarts, which means if a thousand clients were connected, they would all lose their stream
I want to know if there is a better approach possibly? Once again, all it has to do is download a video and have the download go into the standard input of ffmpeg, and the standard output of ffmpeg go back as the response from the service. Would python maybe work better for this? Could it fulfill the task, scale well, and also not have the problem of disconnecting all sessions when just one of the requests hits an error?
Thanks so much, Matt
I personally think that Node.js is the best tool for this sort of thing. I would say you just need to focus on catching exceptions in the right places so that an error with a specific stream doesn't affect the rest of the running app.
If you rewrite in Python and fail to catch an exception there, the same thing will happen... your app will exit with an unhandled exception.