Within Wowza Video currently, the infrastructure is designed to spin up a dedicated instance as needed. In other words, it is 1 live stream to 1 server instance so that someone else's source does not impact your event. Since it is an actual instance starting your live stream configuration has no actual impact on the startup time of the instance itself.
The time to start up can take anywhere from 15 seconds (if one happens to already be running at the time) up to 2-3 minutes depending on the number of active instances in a region. Typically, we see 45 seconds on average.
The configuration is retrieved once an instance is started. Then it is copied and Wowza Streaming Engine is quickly restarted to load it.
We cannot guarantee or restrict the amount of startup time required for an instance.
YOUR OPTIONS
To get an understanding of when this instance is ready to be connected to, you can fetch the state of the transcoder. Review documentation for the REST API regarding this call.
https://api.docs.video.wowza.com/current/tag/transcoders#operation/showTranscoderState
In addition to all of these details, we have some other options to consider to improve workflow connection time:
Speed up the connection to a transcoder in Wowza Streaming Video
Control a transcoder with a Wowza stream source in Wowza Streaming Video