How to stress-test HTTP Live Streaming

Question

We built an youtube-like Rails application that serves videos using HTTP Live Streaming which are hosted on our company's S3-like (actually Ceph Object Gateway S3 API) cloud service.

It's the first public application on that storage service and we would like to know how much concurrent viewers it can handle beforehand.

We know that the network connection (10Gbps) will become the bottle neck at a certain stage, but we have no idea how much load the actual storage cloud service is able to handle.

How would you stress-test the HTTP Live Streaming?

Is something similar to this (UDP) suggestion an option in this (TCP) case?

Answer 1

If you're testing HTTP streams you might be able to test it using JMeter though you'd probably need a hosted JMeter solution to create enough traffic.

I'm not sure if you'd be able to get any helpful response time info, but you would at least be able to easily create and ramp up the load.

Let me know if you need help with the JMeter side.

Answer 2

You can use either a JMeter SAAS or cloud servers to overcome the network issue, and for JMeter you can use this commercial plugin which simulates realistically the Players behaviour and give useful metrics:

• http://www.ubik-ingenierie.com/blog/easy-and-realistic-load-testing-of-http-live-stream-hls-with-apache-jmeter/

Metrics provided by plugin are:

• Buffer fill time (time it took to start playin)
• Lag Time (How many seconds play paused)
• Lag Ratio (waiting time over watching time)

Disclaimer : We are behind the development of this solution