stress test video streaming

Question

is there a way to stress test video streaming? Basically simulating a high number of people simultaneously streaming a video?

This is an amazon 'cloud' service that will be enabled for my site.

Answer 1

Without knowing the streaming protocol it is hard to recommend a specific solution. If it is a Flash-based service, there are some solutions here.

If not, and depending on if it is supported, you could use VLC from the commandline to spawn a bunch of clients. If you disable actually displaying the stream, you should be able to launch many clients per host to simulate a larger number of users.

This page has some details on streaming from the command line. For example, you could duplicate the stream and then set the display to noaudio and novideo. Or, duplicate it to a file and redirect it to /dev/null.

Answer 2

We had to write our own 'VoD-Basher' code to simulate our workflow based on our client interface, DRM and encoding options - there was nothing out there to do what we needed, not for the volumes we needed to simulate (>600k users) anyway.