I recently had an opportunity to consult for a friend of mine on stress testing a multi-player game application. This was a totally new experience for me and this blog is to detail as to how I approached this need to simulate the required amount stress and have it tested under stressed circumstances.
About the Application Architecture
The Application was developed using Flash Action Scripts with few php scripts for some of the support activities. The multi-player platform is aided by SmartFox multi-player gaming middleware. It also makes use of MySQL. The flash files containing the action scripts and a lot of images have been hosted on an Apache web server, which also hosts the PHP. All of Apache, MySQL and SmartFox have been hosted on a single cloud hosted hardware on Linux operating system.
The test approach
My first take on the test approach was to focus on simulating stress on the server and get the client out of the scope of this test. This made sense as all of the flash action scripts get executed on the client side and in reality it is typically single user using the game on a client device and the client side application has all the CPU, memory and related resources available on the client device. Thus in reality there is no multi-player stress on the client.
Given that I will now focus on the impact of the stress on the server resources, I had to understand how the client communicates with the server and about the request / response protocols and related payload. I used Fiddler to monitor the traffic out of the client device on which the game is being played and I could only see http requests for fetching the flash and image files and few of the php files. But I could not find any traffic for the SmartFox Server on http and figured out that those requests are tcp socket requests and thus not captured by fiddler.
The test tools
At this stage, it was much clear that we need to simulate stress on apache by sending in as many http requests, we need to simulate stress on SmartFox server as well over tcp sockets. We have a choice of numerous open source tools to simulate http traffic. I chose JMeter for http traffic simulation, which is open source, UI driven, easy to setup and use. It also supports multi node load simulation.
I need figure out for a tool for simulating load on sockets. I checked with SmartFox to see if they offer a stress test tool, but they don’t. A search through the SmartFox forums revealed that a custom tool is the way to go and to make it easier, we can use one of SmartFox client API libraries, which are available for .NET, Java, Action Script and few other languages. I settled for .NET route as C# is the language in which I have been working with in the recent years.
I have built a multi-threaded custom .NET tool using the SmartFox Client API to simulate the stress on the SmartFox. To my surprise, the SmartFox Client API library has not been designed to work with multi threading and SmartFox support confirmed this behaviour. I then decided redesign my custom tool to use the multi-process architecture and it worked fine..
I needed a server monitoring tool to monitor and measure various server performance parameters under stress conditions. I have found the cloud based NewRelic as the tool of choice to monitor the Linux Server hosting the game components.
The test execution
I had JMeter configured on three nodes (one being the monitoring node) and had set it up to spawn the desired number of threads. I had the custom .NET tool on another client and set it up to spawn the desired number of processes making a sequence of tcp socket requests. I also engaged couple of QA resources to play the game record the user experience under stress conditions.
The test execution went well and we could gather the needed data to form an opinion and make recommendations.
References:
About the Application Architecture
The Application was developed using Flash Action Scripts with few php scripts for some of the support activities. The multi-player platform is aided by SmartFox multi-player gaming middleware. It also makes use of MySQL. The flash files containing the action scripts and a lot of images have been hosted on an Apache web server, which also hosts the PHP. All of Apache, MySQL and SmartFox have been hosted on a single cloud hosted hardware on Linux operating system.
The test approach
My first take on the test approach was to focus on simulating stress on the server and get the client out of the scope of this test. This made sense as all of the flash action scripts get executed on the client side and in reality it is typically single user using the game on a client device and the client side application has all the CPU, memory and related resources available on the client device. Thus in reality there is no multi-player stress on the client.
Given that I will now focus on the impact of the stress on the server resources, I had to understand how the client communicates with the server and about the request / response protocols and related payload. I used Fiddler to monitor the traffic out of the client device on which the game is being played and I could only see http requests for fetching the flash and image files and few of the php files. But I could not find any traffic for the SmartFox Server on http and figured out that those requests are tcp socket requests and thus not captured by fiddler.
The test tools
At this stage, it was much clear that we need to simulate stress on apache by sending in as many http requests, we need to simulate stress on SmartFox server as well over tcp sockets. We have a choice of numerous open source tools to simulate http traffic. I chose JMeter for http traffic simulation, which is open source, UI driven, easy to setup and use. It also supports multi node load simulation.
I need figure out for a tool for simulating load on sockets. I checked with SmartFox to see if they offer a stress test tool, but they don’t. A search through the SmartFox forums revealed that a custom tool is the way to go and to make it easier, we can use one of SmartFox client API libraries, which are available for .NET, Java, Action Script and few other languages. I settled for .NET route as C# is the language in which I have been working with in the recent years.
I have built a multi-threaded custom .NET tool using the SmartFox Client API to simulate the stress on the SmartFox. To my surprise, the SmartFox Client API library has not been designed to work with multi threading and SmartFox support confirmed this behaviour. I then decided redesign my custom tool to use the multi-process architecture and it worked fine..
I needed a server monitoring tool to monitor and measure various server performance parameters under stress conditions. I have found the cloud based NewRelic as the tool of choice to monitor the Linux Server hosting the game components.
The test execution
I had JMeter configured on three nodes (one being the monitoring node) and had set it up to spawn the desired number of threads. I had the custom .NET tool on another client and set it up to spawn the desired number of processes making a sequence of tcp socket requests. I also engaged couple of QA resources to play the game record the user experience under stress conditions.
The test execution went well and we could gather the needed data to form an opinion and make recommendations.
References:
No comments:
Post a Comment