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RE:Streaming Load Tool --- HELP!

Alan:

A previous posting on Streaming Load Tool is pasted below.

-George

StreamingLoadTool does not have to be on the same machine as QTSS. It is actually 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.

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 would probably be 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 movie 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 and watch for packet loss.
3. If the stream still looks good, then return to 1. above and connect more clients.

You can run "top" on the server during the test to watch system resources and determine where any bottlenecks are.

StreamingLoadTool may work better on some platforms than others.. The unix platforms tend to be better than Windows from what I've seen.

Also, you can watch the server bandwidth usage via netstat or the QTSS "-d -S" flags, and compare that number to the expected bandwidth. However, if you use "-S" to collect throughput stats, know that the number will usually be ~10% less than the expected throughput because some packet data isn't included in the reported total (IP headers I believe(?)).. So, if you have 400 300kbit clients connected to the server, you should see around 108000 kbits/sec reported by QTSS (which is 120000 kbit - 10%).

To: email@hidden
Subject: Streaming Load Tool --- HELP!
From: email@hidden
Date: Thu, 23 Jan 2003 11:22:55 -0500

Hello all. Can someone provide instructions on how to use
StreamingLoadTool. I'm running QTSS4.1 on Jaguar and want to simulate 300
users hitting a live unicast.

Thank you in advance for your help.

- AA 
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