How to implement RTMP application load tests ?
The Real-Time Messaging Protocol (RTMP) was designed for high-performance transmission of audio, video, and data between Adobe Flash Platform technologies, including Adobe Flash Player and Adobe AIR. RTMP is now available as an open specification to create products and technology that enable delivery of video, audio, and data in the open AMF, SWF, FLV, and F4V formats compatible with Adobe Flash Player.
Real Time Messaging Protocol (RTMP) is a proprietary protocol developed by Adobe Systems for streaming audio, video and data over the Internet, between a Flash player and a server. RTMP Performances testing shows good results transferring this kind of data.
The RTMP protocol has four variations:
- The "plain" protocol which works on top of TCP and uses port number 1935
- RTMPT which is encapsulated within HTTP requests to traverse firewalls
- RTMPS which works just like RTMPT, but over a secure HTTPS connection.
- RTMPE which works just like RTMP, but over a proprietary encryption mechanism.
The raw TCP-based RTMP maintains a single persistent connection and allows real-time communication. To guarantee smooth delivery of video and audio streams, while still maintaining the ability to transmit bigger chunks of information, the protocol may split video and data into fragments. The size of the fragments used can be negotiated dynamically between the client and server, and even disabled completely if desired, although the default fragment sizes are 128 bytes for video and most other data types, and 64-bytes for audio data. Fragments from different streams may then be interleaved and multiplexed over a single connection.
With innovative RIA technologies like Flex, there are many new challenges to address. If you can address these challenges, you can expect success with Flex. If you're developing or deploying applications in this fresh environment, you need to think about load testing in new ways. This article will to discuss the new challenges in load testing RTMP applications and how to best address them. RTMP Stress test is the only way to be sure the application will work correctly in production. |
