Eve: A Scalable Network Client Emulator

Client emulation tools play a central role in the performance evaluation, capacity planning, and workload characterization of servers. However, traditional emulation tools, because of their limited scalability and extensibility, fail to keep up with servers as they increase in complexity and performance. In this paper, we propose Eve, a scalable client emulation tool that is capable of stress-testing powerful servers. Eve relies on an open and modular architecture that provides a simple and extensible programming environment. By incorporating I/O call handing into its user-thread library, Eve is capable of simultaneously emulating thousands of clients. Furthermore, Eve uses a distributed shared variable (DSV) core to facilitate communication between different clients, thus enhancing scalability to multiple machines.