In this newsletter, we will be discussing WebRTC technology, its testing approach, and how we can measure the performance of WebRTC-based applications providing unified real-time communication.
Video Conferencing Market Trend
Let's take a look at how the video conferencing market surpassed $15 billion USD in 2020 and is expected to grow at a 23% CAGR from 2021 to 2027.
Trend Graph for Global Market Insights:
Source: https://www.gminsights.com/industry-analysis/video-conferencing-market
What is WebRTC?
Load Testing of WebRTC-based Applications
WebRTC apps are made up of a variety of components like RTCPeerConnection, Codecs, and MediaStream. Each of these has an effect on the ecosystem as a whole. So, it is essential to consider each one while planning the performance test.
The following two helpful techniques can be used to assess the performance of WebRTC-based apps, depending on the project requirements:
Selecting Load Testing Tools For WebRTC
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Loadero
- Run test on real browsers
- Support for Selenium with Java and JS
- In-built media files to simulate microphone and webcam
- Options to choose network conditioning, browser versions, computing clients, media feeds
- Provides client machine stats, browser logs, selenium logs, and WebRTC stats and data dumps
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TestRTC
- Scripting using Selenium NightWatch
- Availability of various media codecs
- Define network connection speed and characteristics
- Add customized KPIs
- Ability to run large-scale tests
- Provides metrics such as bit rate, packet loss, CPU use, and other machines metrics data
KPIs for Measuring WebRTC Performance
Since WebRTC provides a huge set of libraries to develop real-time communication applications and everyone does some level of customization, that raises the need for performance measurement of various components.
The following are some important parameters that must be measured:
- Buffering rate
- Success connections
- Average load time for starting stream in the session
- Response time for media server
- Packet loss resulting in pixelated media
- Concurrent Session
- Connection Time for peers
- Lag time for receiving the media stream
- Average Bit Rate
- Jitter
WebRTC Performance Testing Best Practices
Here are some best practices that can help to conduct the WebRTC test:
- Consider stable/unstable networks, media feeds with different formats and different session sizes during the test
- Join the test as a real user to have a real user experience
- WebRTC server components should be tuned well to establish faster communication between peers
- The performance of media and signaling servers should also be monitored
Conclusion
To get useful results from WebRTC-based applications and leverage more benefits, performance testing should be performed using both live sessions that provide real user-based experience, as well as predicted synthetic data that would give better insights for session quality specific to networks and devices. To know more about performance testing services, contact QASource experts now.