Patent ID: 7424528

Claim:
A method comprising: identifying a mixed workload, wherein the mixed workload corresponds to a number of media streams being served concurrently by a media server to a population of clients wherein all of said number of media streams do not comprise common content encoded at a common bit rate; and measuring the capacity of the media server for supporting the mixed workload by using a cost function to compute a load for the media server under the mixed workload, wherein the cost function for computing the load of the media server comprises: Load = ∑ i = 1 k w ⁢ ⁢ N X w i memory × cost X w i memory + ∑ i = 1 k w ⁢ ⁢ N X w i disk × cost X w i disk , wherein the mixed workload comprises k w concurrent streams, X w =X 1 , . . . X k w is a set of encoded bit rates of files served in the mixed workload N X w i memory is a number of streams in the mixed workload having a memory access to a subset of files encoded at X w i Kb/s, cost X W i memory is a cost of consumed resources for a stream having a memory access to a file encoded at X w i Kb/s, N X w i disk is a number of streams in the mixed workload having a disk access to a subset of files encoded at X w i Kb/s, and cost X W i disk is a cost of consumed resources for a stream having a disk access to a file encoded at X w i Kb/s.