The testing was conducted on Nakama Enterprise running on Heroic Cloud, in use by 1000’s of studios across the world with over 350M MAU across all the games they power. The server is agnostic to device, platform and game genre, powering everything from first person shooters and grand strategy titles on PC/Console to Match 3 and Merge games on mobile.

Code Wizards, with our vast experience with AAA games and similar benchmarking for many of our customers on both in-house and external backends, conducted these tests using Artillery in collaboration with AWS and pushed the services of AWS Fargate, and Aurora to their limits.

Nakama on Heroic Cloud was also using AWS running on EC2, EKS, and RDS and fits right into AWS’s elastic hardware scale out model.

To ensure the platform was tested thoroughly, three distinct scenarios were utilized, each with increasing complexity to ultimately mimic real life usage under load. The first scenario designed to prove the platform can easily scale to the target CCU. The second to push variable sized payloads throughout the ecosystem, reflecting realtime user interaction, without stress or strain. And the third to replicate user interactions with the metagame features within the platform itself.  Each scenario ran for 4 hours and between each test the database was restored to a common baseline, ensuring consistent and fair test runs.

TLDR Scale Test Results

• Massive Success: 2,000,000 CCU with zero issues

• Tested Across 3 Scenarios:
  • 1. Basic Stability – Proved the platform can easily handle 2M CCU
  • 2. Realtime Throughput – Extended load with insane messaging workloads
  • 3. Combined Workload – Showcased database-bound interactions at scale

Top Results:

• 2,050,000 clients happily connected
• 0% error rate across all tests
• Messaging rates like you wouldn’t believe

Why Backend-as-a-Service (BaaS)?

In today’s gaming landscape, creating a truly engaging game involves more than just compelling gameplay. Developers also need extensive backend infrastructure for features like user authentication, multiplayer support, community engagement tools, real-time chat, and online leaderboards.

While many developers have the technical skills to build these systems, dedicating time to the intricate task of managing, scaling, and maintaining backend services can detract from their main objective—crafting fun and immersive gaming experiences.

This is where Backend-as-a-Service (BaaS) proves invaluable. Offering pre-configured solutions for essential gaming functionalities, BaaS allows developers to seamlessly integrate these features via an SDK or API, freeing up valuable resources.

Scenario 1 – Basic Stability at Scale

Target:

To achieve basic soak testing of the platform, proving 2M CCU was possible whilst providing baseline results for the other scenarios to compare against.

Setup:

• 82 AWS Fargate nodes each with 4 CPUs
• 25,000 clients on each worker node
• 2M CCU ramp achieved over 50 minutes
• Each client performed the following common actions:
  • Authenticated
  • Created a new account
  • Received a session token
  • Established a realtime socket
• Scenario specific actions performed heartbeat “keep alive” actions using standard socket ping / pong messaging

Result:

Complete success establishing the baseline for future scenarios. Top level output included:

• 2,050,000 worker clients successfully connected
• 683 new accounts per second created – simulating a large scale game launch
• 0% error rate across client workers and server processes – including no authentication errors, and no dropped connections

Scenario 2 – Realtime Throughput

Target:

Aiming to prove that under variable load the Nakama ecosystem will scale as required, this scenario took the baseline setup from Scenario 1 and extended the load across the estate by adding a more intensive realtime messaging workload. For each client message sent, many clients would receive those messages, mirroring the standard message fanout in realtime systems.

Setup:

• 101 AWS Fargate nodes each with 8 CPUs
• 20,000 clients on each worker node
• 2M CCU ramp achieved over 50 minutes
• Each client performed the common actions then Joined one of 400,000 chat channels Sends randomly generated 10-100 byte chat messages at a randomized interval between 10 and 20 seconds

Result:

Another successful run, proving the capacity to scale with load. Culminating in the following top line metrics:

• 2,020,000 worker clients successfully connected
• 1.93 Billion messages sent, at a peak average rate of 44,700 messages per second
• 11.33 billion messages received, with a peak average rate of 270,335 messages per second

NB:- As can be seen in the graph above, an Artillery metrics recording issue (as seen on GitHub) led to a lost data point near the end of the ramp up, but did not appear to present an issue for the remainder of the scenario.

Scenario 3 – Combined Workload

Target:

Aiming to prove the Nakama ecosystem performs at scale under workloads that are primarily database bound. To achieve this, every interaction from a client in this scenario performed a database write.

Setup:

• 67 AWS Fargate nodes each with 16 CPUs
• 30,000 clients on each worker node
• 2M CCU ramp achieved over 50 minutes
• As part of the authentication process in this scenario, the server sets up a new wallet and inventory for each user containing 1,000,000 coins and 1,000,000 items
• Each client performed the common actions then Perform one of two server functions at a random interval between 60-120 seconds. Either Spend some of the coins from their wallet Grant an item to their inventory

Result:

Altering the payload structures to database bound made no difference as the Nakama estate just handled the structure as expected, with very encouraging 95th percentile results:

• Once fully ramped up, clients sustained a top-end workload of 22,300 requests per second, with no significant variation.
• Server requests 95% (0.95p) of processing times remained below 26.7ms for the entire scenario window, with no unexpected spikes at any point.

Conclusion

If you’re looking for a backend that’s launched games to #1 on the App Store and Steam, then you need us!

Ready to scale up? Leave it to the Wizards to provide unbeatable game scaling solutions.