I have an existing JTAPI application that I'm going to be enhancing and refactoring. One of the first concerns is if the new enhancements will scale reasonably well to larger number of IP phones. I've done scalability testing of web services by simulating web service clients with threads, and that approach works well for determining if web services will scale.
Now I'm trying to come up with a way to simulate increasing numbers of IP phones on a network because I obviously don't want to have to build a real network with hundreds or thousands of IP phones.
I'll start with simple JTAPI operations like querying each device on the network to determine which ones are busy, but more complex operations will also have to be tested.
I could build a network of 10 IP phones and "scale out" that network by repeating each JTAPI operation N times for each phone. I would test with N = 1, 3, 7, 10, 30, 70, 100, 300, ... One potential problem with this approach is that the results could end up heavily skewed by the latency of the IP phones in responding to multiple JTAPI operations instead of showing the scalability of a larger network of IP phones responding to a single JTAPI operation.
Another approach is to setup a network of IP soft phones and scale that out, but I don't think IP soft phones would behave like a real IP phone in terms of latency and responding to JTAPI operations.
How have others tested the scalability of their JTAPI applications?
Thanks.