Recently, our CTO and Co-Founder, Tim De Wachter, held a webinar discussing the many benefits of our Load Testing service, providing an in-depth analysis of the product, and how it stands out against others.

In case you missed it, you can find the archived stream below, titled ‘Load Testing - Bigger, Better, Botter’. Otherwise, we thought it would be good to summarize and revisit some key points our expert ethical hacker and cybersecurity specialist touched on.

What is Load Testing, and how does it differ from Stress Testing?

Starting off, Tim clarified what exactly Load Testing is and how it stands out against Stress Testing. Load Testing is described as a process of user behaviour on a large scale by interacting with an application and its functionality within a certain timeframe.

In short, Load Tests are typically conducted in order to make sure that the QoS (quality of service) for your users is always guaranteed.

Stress vs Load Testing: Key differences

While Stress Testing is the type of test you run just to see how far your system gets before it breaks down, Load Testing not only tests your system’s durability under a set load, but also you can see whether your infrastructure is scalable enough. At a glance, here are the key differences between Stress Testing and Load Testing.

Stress

• Resilience
• Load Specific
• DDOS

Load

• Scalability
• All your services
• Full cycle of functionalities
• Real player behaviour

If you’re interested in finding out more about Stress Testing vs Load Testing, be sure to check out our recent article, where we gave an in-depth analysis of these key differences.

The 4 key reasons for Load Testing

After comparing the two tests, Tim continued to talk about the four key reasons for Load Testing, and how it has proven to be highly effective for our various global clients.

• Ensure steady launch – this is self-explanatory, but everyone wants to kick things off for their business in the smoothest way possible. Whether you're launching a new game or a major new update that has additional features, you want to have an everlasting good first impression with your customers.

• Cost-effectiveness - time is money, and if you’re conducting too many tests because you’re unsure how many users are active, then all you’re doing is wasting both. Load Testing ensures you avoid that by showing you the exact resources required to support your expected user load.

• Future-proof scaling - your company is expanding, but so is your user base. This is where things get complicated, as you need to be able to accommodate these additional users, and sometimes your product can’t keep ahead of the curve. This is additional pressure your developers don’t need, and worse yet, if your users notice the product is having issues, it can lead to bad word of mouth. Something you really don’t need, especially for a new and growing business.

• Global footprint - if you have a global user base, you want to ensure the same level of quality and performance is spread throughout evenly. A user from one point of the world should not experience more lag than another. Load Testing provides you with in-depth metrics and response times of all your users, no matter where they are. This enables you to make the necessary changes wherever and whenever you need.

How does Cyrex accomplish Load Testing?

When comparing Cyrex to other businesses that conduct Load Tests, we differ because we don't need human intervention, with our technology we are disrupting this manual service. Nor does our technology need a game client, it's fully headless. We intercept the traffic that goes between the client and servers. We then generate headless scripts, which simulate both the user behaviour and the common processes of a certain user. We also take into account semi-random behaviour of users.

Load Testing is an ideal fit for when we conduct a Penetration Test as we can perform both simultaneously, and our team only needs to produce research and implementation once.

Cyrex Swarm

Finally, Tim demonstrated our fully custom developed Load Test for this particular webinar. Using a feature of Unreal Engine that we currently use in-house, he demonstrated all the exciting new features of Cyrex Swarm. The video showed a multitude of zombies spawning throughout the underground environment. Each zombie represented players or characters that would be in your game.

In this specific use case, our technology is spawning them and sending them requests to our game server for these users to begin performing dance moves. The requests appeared to perform seamlessly throughout the clip. Tim advised that you want to cover all the services you have within the game, but generally you should avoid performing every single action within the game, especially at the same time.

Finishing up

Concluding the webinar, Tim quickly spoke about all of Cyrex’ other resources, followed by a short Q&A section, where he provided in-depth answers to questions such as “Can you run a test when you receive a series 500 error?", "What was the largest Load Test you have performed so far?”, and more.

Cyrex has worked on an array of games across a variety of platforms, genres, and concepts. We are so thankful for the confidence of our clients and partners and them believing in us to secure them against malicious actors.

This was just a summary, so to hear the full webinar, you can see it below. To read more about our work, we have a portfolio of some of our clients available as well. Finally, if you’d like to find out more about our work with Load Testing, you can click here. And otherwise, if you have any questions, we’d love to hear from you.