artillery-plugin-hls
v0.0.3
Published
HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) support for Artillery
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artillery-plugin-hls - load test HLS streaming with Artillery
Description
This plugin adds HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) support to Artillery to make it possible to load test HLS streaming servers. With the plugin enabled, when a request to an M3U8 playlist is made, Artillery will parse the playlist, pick one of the alternative streams, and download its segments (.ts
files).
🐞 Please report issues over at https://github.com/shoreditch-ops/artillery/issues
HTTP Live Streaming (HLS)
HTTP Live Streaming (also known as HLS) is an HTTP-based media streaming communications protocol implemented by Apple Inc. as part of its QuickTime, Safari, OS X, and iOS software. Client implementations are also available in Microsoft Edge, Firefox and some versions of Google Chrome. Support is widespread in streaming media servers.
Source: HTTP Live Streaming on Wikipedia
Additional reading:
- HTTP Live Streaming - official Apple documentation
Usage
Install the plugin
npm install -g artillery-plugin-hls
Load the plugin in your test configuration
config:
target: "https://video.example.com"
plugins:
hls: {}
Make a request to an M3U8 playlist
To stream an HLS-encoded video, make a request to an m3u8
playlist, and set the hls
attribute to {}
to use the default options, or customize streaming options:
scenarios:
- name: "Stream an HLS video"
flow:
- get:
url: "/streams/xyz0123/xyz0123.m3u8"
hls:
concurrency: 2
streamSelector:
resolution:
width: 320
height: 184
throttle: 100
HLS Configuration
The following options are supported on the hls
attribute:
concurrency
- the number of segments to download concurrently; defaults to 4throttle
- set to a number (in kb/sec) to throttle bandwidth available to download that streamstreamSelector
- specify how an alternative stream should be selected; defaults to a random stream.
streamSelector options
resolution
- setwidth
andheight
to pick the stream that matchesname
- set to match on theNAME
attribute of a streambandwidth
- set to a number to select a specific bandwidth; or to"min"
/"max"
to select the lowest/highest bandwidthindex
- set to a number to select the alternative stream at that index in the playlist,"random"
to select a stream at random, or"all"
to iterate through all streams.
Reported Metrics
The plugin adds a number of custom metrics to Artillery reports:
- HLS: segment download started - the number of individual segments (
.ts
files) requested from the server - HLS: segment download completed - the number of segments downloaded
- HLS: segment download time - the amount of time it's taken to download a segment
- HLS: stream download time - the amount of time it's taken to download an entire stream
Load Testing HLS at Scale
Streaming video with a large number of virtual users can quickly exhaust all available bandwidth on a single machine. Therefore bandwidth utilization should be monitored closely while tests run to scale out the number of nodes on which Artillery runs as needed.
Artillery Pro provides a solution for running tests from a cluster of nodes easily as well as a number of other team and enterprise-oriented features, and deep AWS integration.
License
Some of the code in this project has been adopted from hls-fetcher, licensed under MIT:
The rest of the code is licensed under MPL-2.0.