Streaming media load testing with Spirent

I got a demo of Spirent Communications’ streaming media load testing capability here at Networld+Interop Las Vegas 2003 and was pretty impressed. Using the company’s Avalanche 2200 customers can push up to 1.6 gigabytes/sec of data representing 30,000 simultaneous users at their server farm to see if it can handle the load. The Avalanche can test all three major formats – Microsoft Windows Media, RealNetworks and QuickTime. All the testing is managed via a browser interface and looks pretty simple to setup. One feature that is not available yet on stream testing is “frustration level”, where you can set a threshold of how long a simulated user waits for content to start streaming before giving up. That feature is available for standard Web site testing and Spirent is working on it for the stream testing.