Wowza Community

HLS/HDS load testing tool

Hi,

You provide load testing tool which loads wowza server only by rtmp protocol. But we need to test how wowza server will behavior if we loaded it by HLS protocol.

Why you don’t provide tool which loading by dynamic protocols?

I’m searching through internet but find only such solution:

http://www.ixiacom.com/products/display?skey=ixload_hls_player_client_emulation

But they are strange guys…

So I’ve started to use open solutions:

On my server I’ve used vlc 2.0.0 and started load by:

vlc -I dummy <url>

it works good, but it using a lot of memory so I can’t start thousands connections on one server.

I’m also try to use ffplay which should support hls, but without display I can’t get it working.

And I think that mplayer should support hls but I can’t get working it too.

So what you suggest in my scenario?

We suggest using the load test tool as it is and adding maybe 10% server-side overhead for segmented streams http streaming is less overhead than rtmp. You can and should also monitor in production.

Richard

Actually, a correction: HTTP streaming is a bit lighter on server overhead compared to RTMP.

Richard

The levers are those cupertino packetizer settings and frequent key frame frequency. Try a 1 second key frame frequency with cupertinoChunkDurationTarget of “1000”, or 2 seconds and “2000”. But there is more latency in this type of streaming compared to RTMP.

Richard

Hi xzerth,

Thanks for this information.

If that tool is not sufficient for your test, the Wowza RTMP load testing tool will still be useful for you to load test CPU, disk and your network bandwidth. As Richard mentioned the results obtained with the RTMP loadtester will be similar to results you would get with HTTP.

Hi,

Well, I’ve found hls-player package: http://code.google.com/p/hls-player/

It has -D option which means no display and -k option which means “keep packets on store” which I’ve set to 0 (zero, so no packets saves).

This player can be used for loading wowza by http live streaming protocol.

On client machine (where hls-player which loads wowza server somewhere) it uses memory in such way: 60 connections with 600 kbps using 2+ Gb memory.

Hi

HLS will always be lower overhead than RTMP even if you change the default settings.

Your CPU usage will be slightly higher but this doesn’t effect the bandwidth usage.

Jason

Hi

The way that HLS works is that Wowza creates chunks and sends these chunks to the iOS device, my default the device will require 3 chunks each of which are 10 seconds in length.

You can reduce the length of the chunks and the amount of chunks buffered etc using the tutorial here,

https://www.wowza.com/docs/how-to-configure-apple-hls-packetization-cupertinostreaming

If this is what you’ve been playing with already then you may be at the minimum delay for stream via HLS.

What did you get the delay down to?

If you’re using the SilverLight player you can edit the configuration in the same way by using this guide,

https://www.wowza.com/docs/how-to-configure-microsoft-smooth-streaming-packetization-smoothstreaming

Jason

Hi

will the load test result of “low latency HTTP” still be lighter then RTMP ?

my low latency settings are 2 seconds segments 4 seconds total playlist duration ,

Yaniv

10x Jasson for the quick replay,

my fear is the huge amount of M3U8 and TS requests…

each client in a low latency configuration is requesting playlist and TS files rapidly.

there must be a difference in performance between normal HLS config and low latency config.

Yaniv

eggPlant, the GUI based test tool can perform load testing that actually measures the user experience as opposed to the more traditional approach that merely measures server statistics.

testplant.com

Hi ,

We experience high latency problems when playing a live broadcast stream via HLS, the delay can get as high as 20-30 secs.

We played with cupertino streaming configuration parameters and reduced the delay somewhat, but it’s still unacceptable.

With rtmp/rtsp playback, the delay is just 3 seconds. Is there anything we can do to reduce the HLS delay to under 10 seconds?

Hello,

If you’re looking for a load test tool to simulate real world traffic from multiple users and possibly around the world, we provide a commercial plugin called UbikLoadPack Video Streaming Plugin which is integrated with the well known Open Source Apache JMeter.

It supports Apple HLS (VOD and Live) and MPEG-DASH as of March 2017.

It allows you to get useful metrics like lag, buffer fill time and lag ratio.

It is very simple to use and can be used from the Cloud through our partner offer or on premise on any Cloud.

You can read more on it here:

Load testing HLS

Load Testing MPEG-DASH

Regards

UbikLoadPack Team

you can try this (www.pcloudy.com). it’s a best mobile app testing tool.