For client machines we used 10 Intel Celeron 500-MHz white box PCs running Microsoft Windows 2000 and an Apple Computer PowerBook G3 connected to the [devices under test] at 100 Mbps through an Extreme Summit48 switch, and then to a dual NIC Dell Computer PowerEdge 2450 running Windows 2000 with routing enabled. A T3 (45 Mbps) link was simulated with a Shunra Software's Storm STX-100.

Our server was an Apple Macintosh dual 800-MHz G4 with 1 GB of RAM. We ran FTP, Apache Web server and the Apple Darwin streaming server and used Mercury Interactive's LoadRunner 7.5.1 to generate as many as 100 real TCP sessions. We broadcast "live" a large QuickTime movie set to nonterminating continuous loop. This movie output was, on average, 1.6 Mbps per stream.

LoadRunner let us generate real Windows TCP sessions, and we always ran enough users to oversaturate the T3. Our Web tests included simulating users downloading several multimegabyte pages as well as multiple small pages in succession.

We also tested transferring Web and FTP data simultaneously. We set a policy for a minimum of 20 Kbps per connection with a burst of 50 Kbps, a minimum of 500 Kbps per connection for Web traffic, and 20 Mbps maximum for FTP. We also tested streaming video while concurrently running 100 large Web transfers.

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Looks like Macs are making a slow comeback!