The present invention provides for a method and apparatus for comparison of network systems using live traffic in real-time. The inventive technique presents real-world
workload in real-time with no external
impact (i.e. no
impact on the
system under test), and it enables comparison against a production
system for
correctness verification. A preferred embodiment of the invention is a testing tool for the pseudo-live testing of CDN content staging servers, According to the invention, traffic between clients and the live production CDN servers is monitored by a simulator device, which then replicates this
workload onto a
system under test (SUT). The simulator detects divergences between the outputs from the SUT and live production servers, allowing detection of erroneous behavior. To the extent possible, the SUT is completely isolated from the outside world so that errors or crashes by this system do not affect either the CDN customers or the end users. Thus, the SUT does not interact with end users (i.e., their web browsers). Consequently, the simulator serves as a proxy for the clients. By basing its behavior off the packet
stream sent between
client and the live production system, the simulator can simulate most of the oddities of real-world
client behavior, including malformed packets, timeouts, dropped traffic and reset connections, among others.