Hey everyone,
While we're completing the cache feature within MistServer, we figured we write a guide about one of the major reasons why we created this cache in the first place. The ability to cache HLS segments instead of serving an unique HLS stream to every viewer.
Now serving an unique stream comes with some benefits, you can change the segments viewers receive from the server per viewer uniquely. This allows us to set up an unique experience per viewer, but also perform tricks like A/B watermarking. So there's reasons to keep it around. However if you want to serve everyone the exact same stream there's no reason to create an unique one per user. This is where Nginx and a proxycache comes into play.
Benefits to using a cache for HLS segments would be that the CPU load goes down drastically and you still have some control options as the playlists viewers use to connect can still be manipulated individually. So you can essentially choose form which cache they should be loading.
You can find the guide here