Cost-effective load testing of WebRTC applications

Background: Video conference applications and systems implementing the WebRTC W3C standard are becoming more popular and demanded year after year, and load testing them is of paramount importance to ensure they can cope with demand. However, this is an expensive activity, usually involving browsers to emulate users. Goal : to propose browser-less alternative strategies for load testing WebRTC services, and to study performance and costs of those strategies when compared with traditional ones. Method: (a) Exploring the limits of existing and novel strategies for load testing WebRTC services from a single machine. (b) Comparing the common strategy of using browsers with the best of our proposed strategies in terms of cost in a load testing scenario. Results: We observed that, using identical machines, our proposed strategies are able to emulate more users than traditional strategies. We also found a huge saving in expenditure for load testing, as our strategy suppose a saving of 96% with respect to usual browser-based strategies. We also found there are almost no differences between the traditional strategies considered. Conclusion: We provide details on scalability of different load testing strategies in terms of users emulated, as well as CPU and memory used. We could reduce the expenditure of load tests of WebRTC applications. (c) 2022 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Inc. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

Automated summary

This study proposes browser-less alternative strategies for load testing WebRTC services and compares their performance and costs with traditional strategies. The results show that our proposed strategies are able to emulate more users than traditional strategies on identical machines. We also found a significant cost saving in load testing with our strategies, reducing expenditure by 96% compared to browser-based strategies.