ARM or x86 for WebRTC media servers? Participants per node on 3 clouds
On every major cloud, an ARM instance costs less per hour than the x86 instance of the same size. On AWS, for example, a 4-vCPU Graviton3 machine is about 20% cheaper than its Intel equivalent. But a lower price only saves money if the machine can handle a similar load, and for a WebRTC media server that means forwarding a similar number of RTP packets per second.
We didn't find any published numbers for SFU workloads on ARM, so we ran the test ourselves. We deployed the same OpenVidu 3.8 single node on matching ARM and x86 instances in AWS, Google Cloud and Oracle Cloud, and used the same load generator and ramp on all of them, adding participants until the CPU ran out.