St-load: Streaming Load Testing Tool – Installation, Configuration, and Usage Guide

To facilitate pressure testing of streaming media services, we recommend the St-load tool, which supports RTMP push testing (up to 500 concurrent streams per process), RTMP pull testing (up to 5,000 concurrent streams per process), HTTP load testing (repeated downloads of a single file), and HLS parsing and testing (both VOD and live).

Installation

1. Download the St-load source package on a Linux environment: git clone https://github.com/rzrobert/st-load-master.git 2. Compile the source code:

cd st-load-master/

./configure

make

After compilation, executable files are generated in the objs directory.

Push Stream Section

1. Prepare the RTMP layer in nginx.conf before pushing streams.

2. Simulate a single‑channel RTMP push:

./sb_rtmp_publish -i /usr/local/ffmpeg/cnlzd.flv -c 1 -r rtmp://127.0.0.1/live/livestream

3. Simulate multi‑channel RTMP push (e.g., 10 concurrent streams):

./sb_rtmp_publish -i /usr/local/ffmpeg/cnlzd.flv -c 10 -r rtmp://127.0.0.1/live/livestream_{i}

Common parameters:

-i : input stream

-c : number of concurrent instances (default 1)

-r : target URL (equivalent to --url URL)

-s : thread start delay, default 5.00 seconds; 0 means no delay

Note: sb_rtmp_publish only supports .flv video format.

Pull Stream Section

1. RTMP Pull

RTMP (Real Time Messaging Protocol) is used for real‑time audio/video communication between Flash/AIR platforms and streaming servers.

Pull command: ./sb_rtmp_load -c 1 -r rtmp://127.0.0.1:1935/live/livestream 2. HTTP Pull

HTTP is an application‑layer protocol suitable for distributed multimedia systems; it also carries video on demand in HTML5.

Pull command: ./sb_http_load -c 1 -r http://127.0.0.1:8081/live/livestream 3. HLS Pull

HLS (HTTP Live Streaming) is Apple’s adaptive bitrate streaming technology, using an .m3u8 index file and TS media segments.

Segment strategy: typically 10‑second segments, with a sliding window of the latest three segments.

Example .m3u8 file header:

#EXTM3U
#EXT-X-MEDIA-SEQUENCE:7
#EXT-X-TARGETDURATION:15
#EXTINF:15.099

Pull command:

./sb_hls_load -c 1 -r http://127.0.0.1:8081/hls/livestream/index.m3u8