Handy checklist for ensuring User Experience when delivering Video Streams at Large Scale

on 4 February 2019 ABR-Streaming, CLOUD, DEVOPS, HLS, HTML5, LOAD_TESTING, Microsoft-Smooth, MPEG-DASH, OTT, PERFORMANCE, SMOOTH Streaming, TUNING, VIDEO and Tags: , , , , , , with 0 comments

Below are excerpts from our article published in OTT Executive magazine spring 2019 issue. The full and detailed article is available free of charge online at https://ottexec.com/magazine/

Ensuring video performance is a major challenge due to several factors, the most important ones being:

  • The number of tiers involved
  • The network bandwidth
  • The location of your customers
  • The unknown potential traffic
  • The potential unexpected peak traffic called the “snowball effect”

For the end customer, problems can manifest themselves in three ways:

  • Initial buffer fill
  • Lag time
  • Delay in streaming


To ensure your content is delivered correctly, you should anticipate and run load tests on your infrastructure so that you can fine tune, add software layers (caching), and know your users’ future experience before they let you know how bad it is.

To ensure your load test is useful, here are some hints that will help you succeed in your testing:

  • Ensure you don’t test the cache, which makes you think everything is OK even if it’s not.
  • Check all the content you deliver
  • Reproduce the players’ behavior:
  • Collect the critical metrics:
    • Initial buffer time
    • Lag times
    • Lag ratio
    • Cache hit/miss ratio from potential CDN
    • Age of the chunks
  • Test often and automate as much as you can

At UbikLoadPack we provide an OOTB solution which answers almost all requirements of Video Streaming Servers load testing, you can read more about it here:

About us:

About author:

Philippe Mouawad is a developer, committer and member of the JMeter Project Management Committee at Apache.

He is also the co-author of the book Master JMeter : from load testing to DevOps.

He currently works as an Architect and technical expert for Ubik-Ingenierie where he leads among other things the development of UbikLoadPack a set of Commercial Plugins for Apache JMeter allowing to load test different protocols like MPEG-DASH, Http Live Streaming (HLS), HSS, HDS, GWT, JavaSerialization, Oracle applications.

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