Using Seastar Framework to Build a Foundation for Video Streaming Testing

At Broadpeak, we initiated an effort to use an in-house benchmarking tool built upon Seastar. Our benchmarking tool emulates thousands of HLS or DASH video clients benefiting from the asynchronous programming model of the Seastar C++ Framework with capabilities similar to JMeter but with complete support for HTTP/2, as well as high performance thanks to an extensive use of the native stack based on TCP. We tested up to 170 Gbps HTTP/1.1 traffic and 100+ Gbps HTTP/2 on a single dual-socket server. This shows that Seastar is well suited for applications beyond servers. During the presentation, we will highlight some limitations of the Seastar Framework we identified for such kind of client applications and the fixes we made.