How to load test website with SWF Flash file?

Question

I have a website that has a SWF embbeded on it with SWFObject. This SWF file has 1,5 MB. I would like to test if website (Lightppd) will be alive if 600 users per hour will try to open it. It will be approx. 900 MB / hour of transfer.

So I have 2 questions in one:

1) Does ab (Apache Bench) test handle SWFObject and gets SWF file while testing too? 2) If 1) is false how to load test my website with SWF file embedded properly?

Answer 1

I think it would. I think it would just do one HTTP request for the page. Here is what I would suggest:

• Use firebug or Fiddler (or a similar tool - or your web server access logs) to find out all the HTTP requests.
• Now I am not sure how you can do this with 'ab' but you need to be able to create several requests to mimic the browser. There you may be needing another tool like jMeter or something.

As for tuning after your first tests:

• Make sure your SWFObject is being served with an ETag to enable caching.
• If possible; serve the object with a unique URL and set the expiry to a year or something. This would make sure that browsers (or proxies on the way) won't hit the server until your object is updated hence having a new URL.