Ensuring the performance of your video streaming infrastructure

If you deliver Over The Top (OTT) media services, you need to ensure that the performances of your video streaming is good and that your end users are not facing Lag or buffering when using your platform.

Delivering  such services with good performances is not a simple matter.

Monitoring the production environment is critical but surely not enough as even if you’ll be notified about the issues, it will be too late for your users.

And since nowadays with social media, the bad buzz can be deadly for your brand, you’d better anticipate such issues. Some main actors around the world have discovered this with the Football World Cup 2018.

So what should you do ?

Load Testing as a way to anticipate peak traffic

The best way to anticipate future performance issues or to prepare for exceptional events is to Load Test.

But load testing Video Streaming is not a simple matter of running a set of CURL /WGET as such test will not be realistic at all.

Besides, you need to handle most popular streaming format which manifests differ quite a lot, indeed there is nothing common between HLS (Text format) , MPEG-DASH (XML format 1), HSS (XML format 2) or HDS (binary).

Finally Streaming format can be Live or VOD and the frequency and nature of requests that will hit your servers (CDN or Origin) will be quite different.

Hopefully, we have one of the most advanced performance testing software in the market for Video Streaming that will help you reproduce a realistic player behavior in few seconds  as it is just a matter of few clicks to simulate any of those formats.

Out of the box, UbikLoadPack Video Streaming plugin for Apache JMeter provides:

• Support for Live and VOD for Main Streaming Formats (HLS, MPEG-DASH, HSS, HDS) without any scripting
• Realistic download of manifests and fragments as a real player would do it
• Custom metrics to analyze your user experience and servers behavior
• IP Spoofing
• Ability to add custom metrics to analyze CDN caching
• Scalable load testing as with one machine similar to m5.2xLarge, you’ll be able to load test 500 to 2000 Virtual Users playing video streams

Analyzing the load test

During your load tests or after running it, you’ll need to analyze your performances and diagnose the weak element of your architecture.

There can be a lot of causes for bad performances:

• Streaming Application on Origin failing to deliver manifests or chunks on time under load
• Servers on Origin misconfiguration
• Network issue between CDN and Origin
• Firewall or router issues on Origin
• Missing or Inefficient CDN caching policy leading to aggressive requesting of Origin
• Firewall or router issues on CDN
• …

Hopefully, our solution allows you to add custom metrics to analyze some of the above issues

Turn Key Professional Service

If you don’t want to tackle the load test yourself or if you need mentoring in this field, we provide Turn Key professional services that can include:

• AWS account setup (we can setup your existing AWS account, or setup a new one that you dedicate to load testing)
• PAAS account setup to interface this AWS account
• Steps to perform load test on AWS without being considered an Attacker
• Test plan setup
• Calibration of 1 injector
• Documentation of the whole setup
• Additional Metrics setup like CDN Caching metrics or other metric that can help you diagnose performance issues
• Test analysis coaching

Our team has experience in load testing Video Streaming Servers up to 100 000 Players (and this is not a technical limit)  and diagnosing issues.

On Premise OR Cloud Ready

Our solution can run in your Data Center without any external access allowing you to load test as close as possible to your Video Streaming servers

But our solution can also be easily setup to run on main cloud providers (AWS, Google Cloud, Azure).

PAAS Ready

Thanks to our partnership with Redline13 , the plugin is available from AWS cloud and ready to use in few clicks.

Note also our plugin can be used on other SAAS providers like:

• CA / Blazemeter
• Flood.io

Try it:

So come and get a free trial version HERE.