Ok, so altogether, I did three major load-testing sessions to which I had invited all people currently registered with the site. The goal of those load-testing sessions was to find out how many simultanuous players my server can currently take. For this purpose, I had created specific load-test clients that would automatically log in to the game and participate in game sessions - all computer controlled. The idea of those load-test clients was to have many of them run simultanuously on tester's machines. So, one tester could simulate 5, maybe 10 clients.

One thing I learned during the process of those three load-testing sessions was that developing a useful load-test client is quite a challenge in itself. Since they ideally do "everything themselves", there's quite a bit of logic that needs to be implemented both client-side and server-side. In the third test, things were pretty well set up. All one would need to do with those clients was start them - the rest would happen automatically. Very nice. Especially, when I closed the server and restarted it - it's quite amazing seeing 60 or 70 "players" log in almost at the same time.

So, during the first two tests things looked pretty relaxed - the main problem was actually that I felt I didn't get enough players online to stress the server. However, during the third test I hit the limit: When having about 80 players distributed into 4 game groups, all playing simultanuously in Level 03: The Cube, the server pretty much went down.

Unfortunately, 80 players is clearly not enough. I'm hoping to be able to host at least 150 to 200 players per server. That's not that much.

So ... what to do? ... well, I found one answer during Unite 2008 ...