Alongside penetration testing and digital safety, it’s just as important to ensure that your application and game can handle the level of traffic you expect and more. That’s where our gold-standard load testing services come into play.   

Load Testing Explained

Load testing services are an array of services that are used to determine how well your system or game handles traffic. There are several types of testing that fall under the umbrella of load testing or performance testing, these include: spike testing, soak testing, peak testing, and stress testing. While each one is a type of load testing, they each serve a unique purpose to test your system’s capacity.  

Types of Load Testing

Spike Testing: Spike testing is a short engagement. Cyrex’ load testers will simulate a spike of users, often above the expected capacity and intended to break past the max designed capacity. This is a great example of how your system operates under huge, sudden pressure such as a launch day, major update release, or an NFT drop.

Soak Testing: Soak testing is definitely the longest form of load testing. Somewhere between twelve and twenty-four hours, this load testing service will soak your system with slightly above expected user traffic. This is good for ensuring your system can maintain ongoing updates or backups despite traffic. Video game leaderboards is a typical example, regularly updating.



Peak Testing: Peak testing is a sustained performance test to ensure your system can handle its expected higher traffic loads. Peak user numbers are quite predictable, such as post-work evening for gaming, or end of month for accountancy platforms.   

Stress Testing: Stress testing is often what most people refer to when thinking of load or performance testing. It is definitely the most common of the load testing services. Traffic is simulated at a low volume before slowly ramping up. The goal of this test is to find where your system struggles and where it breaks.  

Why Do I Need Load Testing?

Cyrex’ goal as a team is to make the digital world stable and secure, we do that by breaking stability and security. Your platform’s stability is just as important as its security. While its stability might not indicate an insecure system, an unstable or inefficient system will affect you in both user satisfaction, loyalty, and can easily impact your revenue  

User Loyalty and Satisfaction

When it comes to large drops, updates, or launches, any system that struggles and fails will see a huge impact on user satisfaction. An unsatisfied user base will not draw in new audiences and if left unaddressed, will result in a loss of users. Players and users outside of gaming will not stick around through bad performance or stick with a platform that cannot remain up during high levels of traffic.  

Revenue Impact

While this point is linked to a loss of users and therefore less revenue through user interaction, an unoptimized system will also cost you. Platform stability and its capacity to deal with large numbers of users is not the only thing tested by our team during the load testing process. Your system’s ability to scale, both upwards and downwards, to accommodate the level of users is key to good performance and an appropriate revenue investment.   

Our Proprietary Load Testing Tool: Cyrex Swarm

Our talk on these services is backed up by a bespoke designed system, an AWS load testing service that we created. Cyrex Swarm is our headless, cloud-based video game load testing tool that can handle your testing needs up to any number of users. Whether your needs are thousands or hundreds of thousands, as a cloud-based tool, it is not bound or limited by hardware as many contemporary services are.  

Swarm has just entered a beta, where we are beginning closed testing of the service to allow clients independent testing using our gold-standard tool. On a cost-per-use basis, it means our clients will be able to privately test their own systems and only pay for what they use rather than a generic payment system that might not fit their needs. All the involvement we need is to assist in the development of your typical player journey and you are good to go.  

Additionally, Cyrex Swarm provides out-of-the-box support for any standard or typical networking library that gaming applications employ. Thanks to our extensive experience working with the gaming industry, we guarantee seamless communication with your backend.

We hope this gave you a good insight into what load testing is, what it brings to your platform, and how we offer the leading gold-standard of testing on the market. If you’re interested in utilising our expertise in load or penetration testing, or development, don’t hesitate to get in touch.