This week I spent my time working on user simulation scripts. The goal is to create python scripts that will mimic user behaviour on our video server so that we can test it’s performance as well as benchmark the performance of our load balancer.
I spent time learning about python requests library and created a script that can send requests to the RandomLB and RoundRobinLB instances that are deployed. After the request has been sent, I print the response object received from the server and isolate the HTML information.
Going forward I know need to calculate metrics such as response time as well as buffer length and bitrate. Even though these user end metrics are not going to be used for optimising our load balancer, they are crucial in testing the performance of both our video server and load balancer. Since our video server loads video files chunk by chunk, I will have to calculate the response time every second or so and then divide the total response time by the total size of the video to determine the average bit rate for that particular video file.