Anyone using OBS to do live streaming?

Disclaimer: not a pro or expert on this level, but have had to troubleshoot some similar intermittent issues with clients in the past.

The first thing I would note is that OBS in particular seems to have some issues if the computer was asleep at some point before starting OBS or starting to stream (Resetting fixes that issue). Other times, I know to youtube, OBS can have some odd behaviors very rarely with horrible performance that can be corrected just by stopping and starting the stream again. Putting aside the generic IT "restart it" solutions...

I think far more people deal with issues on stable upload than not, but for the majority of ISP customers, you would hardly notice it outside of some web apps behaving a little more erratically than normal.

I'd first look into whether you're dealing with pocket loss when the issue is occurring. The issue will often not display itself until you're actually having these upload issues, so it can be hard to troubleshoot the other 95% of the time when your connection is good. I don't have the exact instructions, but you can use command prompt on windows to ping whatever public DNS you see fit* to see if there's any issue on that front -- but again, if it's like what I've encountered, nothing will look abnormal until the unstable upload issue is actually happening again. There are other "test" sites out there that will measure these metrics, but I don't recall which ones off the top of my head.

In any case, if you can document reported packet-loss, it might give you a little more to work with your ISP; if you're on a business account and paying that bloody premium, it tends to be a little easier to twist your ISP's arms to get an actual tech out to check out what's going on, but this can be an ordeal - depending on the tech, if they come out when everything is working fine, they could fail to comment the complexity of the situation on the support ticket, leave and you're back to square one.

There is a possibility that what you're dealing with is more related to node or hub issues, something local, but I wouldn't think this is OBS-related if the problem doesn't occur consistently and seems to come and go without any drastic changes to your OBS settings.

My sympathies, network issues can be a bit of a headache.

I've been thinking of just doing a prerecorded version but there's something about the live interaction that is appealing to me.

Enlav, I work in IT during the day (to pay the bills). This is an odd one. I had checked for bottlenecks in the local network but didn't find any. That's why I started wondering about YouTube itself as being a source of the issue. Seems hard to believe but I couldn't come up with any other workable theory.