How to stress-test video streaming server?

start downloading 5000+ files of the same type with different connections. Don't really need to play them, because essentially the client video player, flash, windows media player, etc. will just be doing a download. So if you server can handle 5000+ downloads you will be fine. My bet is your bandwidth gives out before you server.

For infrastructure, you can use either a JMeter SAAS or your own Cloud server to overcome possible network issues from your injector.

To reproduce user experience and have precious metrics about user experience, you can use Apache JMeter + this commercial plugin which simulates realistically the Players behavior without any scripting:

• Apple HTTP Live Streaming
• MPEG-DASH Streaming
• Smooth Video Streaming

This plugin also provide the ability to simulate Adaptive Bitrate Streaming

Disclaimer : We are behind the development of this solution

One option is to use VLC. You can specify a url on the command line. (see here for details). You could then write a brief shell script to open up all 5000 connections.

eg. the following perl script (very quick hack - check before running, might cause explosions etc.)

$i = 0;
$myurl = "udp://someurl";
@cmdline = ("/usr/bin/vlc", "");
for( $i = 1; $i <= 5000; $i++ )
{
    if( $pid = fork )
    {
        # parent - ignore
    }
    elsif( defined $pid )
    {
        $cmdline[1] = sprintf "%s:%d", $myurl, $i;
        exec(@cmdline);
    }
    # elseif - do more error checking here
}

If your video streaming server is doing multicast it should be sufficient to open sockets and make them members of your 5000 multicast groups (without necessarily doing anything with the stream. By not actually decoding the stream you will reduce performance issues on the client end).

I'm not aware of any tools that will do this for you, but if you're up for writing your own utility you can start here for details.

edit: The second option assumes that the OS on your client machine has multicast capability. I mention that because (from memory) the linux kernel doesn't by default, and I'd like to save you that pain. :-)

Easy way to tell (again on Linux) is to check for the presence of /proc/net/igmp