A system and method of transmitting data packets. The system determines one or
more system conditions of the server computer and modifies a process of transmitting
the data packets from a server computer to a client computer, the modifying based
at least in part upon the determined system conditions. The determined system conditions
can include: (i) the number of forced processings of network events, (ii) the number
of clients computers that are behind their scheduled delivery time, (iii) the number
of client computers that have requested streamable data objects, (iv) the total
byte count of the streamable data objects that have been requested by the client
computers, (v) the number of the streamable data objects that have been requested
by the client computers, (vi) the number of streamable data objects that are maintained
by the streaming media server, and/or (vii) the actual transmission rate of the
streaming media server with respect to the client computers. In one embodiment
of the invention, the server computer aggregates data packets prior to transmitting
the data packets to a client computer when the load of the server computer becomes
high or extremely high.
