I've found firms that offer load testing services, but I haven't
found any
tools that I can use myself.
Here's some info on load testing the streaming server...
-George
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Any hinted movie will work as the target for StreamingLoadTool.
Typically you will have several clients running StreamingLoadTool,
each pointing at different pieces of media.
StreamingLoadTool does not have to be on the same machine as QTSS.
Its better to run it on remote machines so that it doesn't use up the
server's resources. You'll need to modify the
"streamingloadtool.conf" file to customize it for your purposes. The
file is in /Library/QuickTimeStreaming/Config or /etc/streaming
depending on your OS. Then run "StreamingLoadTool -f <config file>"
specifying where the config file is. The remote server will need to
have a hinted movie in its Movies directory called
"streamingloadtool.mov", which tells StreamingLoadTool that its okay
to send requests to the server.. You can just copy one of the sample
files to "streamingloadtool.mov" to create the file.
StreamingLoadTool performance is limited by a few factors- per-
process UDP limits, OS networking limits, etc. For 2-track movies,
you probably won't be able to get more than 200 clients per
StreamingLoadTool session- see the "concurrentclients" option in the
config file. The clients network connection needs to be able to
support the bandwidth used by the simultaneous connections.
In the config file You'll probably want to set the "runforever"
option to "yes". This will request all of the streams
simultaneously, and will loop when the time specified by
"movielength" runs out. To best simulate most real-world conditions,
you'll want to use the "reliableudp" transport. You can also
increase the "overbufferwindowsize" to better simulate actual
clients.. something higher than 16384 is usually best.
You can have StreamingLoadTool create a log file for analysis. If
you do this, you'll want to ignore the reported packet loss in the
log, since it isn't calculated correctly. The best way to determine
the server's limit is to use the following method:
1. Connect X amount of StreamingLoadTool clients to a movie.. Ideally
the movies should be > 1 or 2 minutes long, because the clients will
cause more stress on the server if they disconnect/reconnect to the
movies.
2. Connect a QT player to a movie and view the stream, looking for
packet loss in the stream. You can use Command-J to view the stream
info on the streaming track and watch for packet loss.
3. If the stream still looks good, then return to 1. above and
connect more clients.
4. Run "top" on the server during the test to watch system resources
and determine where any bottlenecks are.
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