JMeter. These tools will help make sure your registration form can handle a high number of concurrent users and does not crash under high load. Try to integrate them into your continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) cycle and test your forms and core logic before deploying live.
These tools are fairly straightforward to use. For instance, you can create a login test using Locust like this:
from locust import HttpUser, task
class LoginUser(HttpUser):
@task
def process_login(self):
self.client.post("/login", json={"username":"foo", "password":"bar"})
The above code will continuously send post requests to the /login
endpoint. (You’ll want it to stop eventually!) You can explore the Locust documentation for more examples.
Almost every server framework contains some caching functionality. Make sure you’re using it, and try to cache as many resources as you can. This will make sure your server resources are being used most efficiently and are not being wasted by serving the same content to users.
Multiple open source tools are useful here as well. For example, Memcached is an in-memory cache used by Netflix and Facebook, as well as other companies, that offers bindings for multiple languages. Redis is an in-memory database that is also used as a cache by developers.
You can also explore Cloudflare and Fastly as external cache proxies. They can save you a lot of money on top of resources by caching static content on the edge. This will also improve the user experience (UX) because users will be served content from the nearest edge server.
It’s always better to be equipped for unexpected scenarios. If your server code is deployed on a widely available public cloud like AWS, Google Cloud, or Azure, make sure you are using the available autoscaling functionality from your cloud provider and set some sane thresholds. This will ensure that no matter how much traffic you get on launch day, your servers can scale and cater to the increased demand.
If you’re on AWS, you can use EC2 Auto Scaling, which relies on machine learning to horizontally scale your EC2 instances. You can configure it based on multiple criteria to make sure the threshold value is optimized for your budget. The picture below (taken from AWS) shows the different available threshold options:
Similar options are available for Google Cloud Compute Engine and Microsoft Azure.
No matter how much effort you put in, unexpected things happen on launch days. A monitoring service such as Sentry, New Relic, or LogRocket can help you stay prepared for unexpected runtime errors. Almost all of these services provide SDKs for most major languages. You can use them on your frontend as well as your backend and have alerts in place as soon as errors start popping up. You can’t fix something that you don’t know about, and the sooner you uncover runtime errors, the quicker you can fix them and make your game bug-free.
These services have developer-friendly integration documentation, generally offer a free tier, and require minimal effort to integrate with your code as a middleware in your backend or frontend stack.
Note that if you’re using a multi-step registration form, you should make sure the alerts fire appropriately if an error occurs in the intermediary steps of the registration flow.
Launch days also invite attention from bots, which could be random but could also be targeted efforts by your competitors. CAPTCHA stands for Completely Automated Public Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart. A CAPTCHA service is an easy first line of defense. Implementing one won’t automatically thwart all bot traffic, but it will make sure you execute IO-heavy database tasks only when legitimate users try to sign up.
You must verify a CAPTCHA as the first step on your backend and execute any intensive tasks after successful verification. Otherwise, the CAPTCHA will prevent bots from signing up but will not meaningfully help you in conserving your server resources.
If you’re not a big fan of CAPTCHAs, you can also try adding a hidden field to make sure bots aren’t filling out the form. If that field has a non-default value, then you can safely discard the form submission. I used this technique with the comments system on my blog and effectively cut down automated bot comments by 98 percent. This measure fails when confronted with any decent bot since it’s easy to bypass, but it’s better than nothing, and avoids hassling your users with a CAPTCHA.
Try to reduce the number of form fields you ask the user to fill out on initial sign-up. Ask only questions that are crucial for user gameplay. Even then, try to split the form into multiple steps and get the user’s email first.
This tip is just as important for better user experience as it is for preserving server resources. The longer the registration form, the higher the chances of a user giving up before completing it. You can always ask for more details once the user has played the game and is more willing to share extra information. If an error occurs in the later steps of the registration flow, you’ll already have the user’s email and can reach out to invite them back to the game and finish the registration.
Implementing authentication and authorization can be tricky, and if it’s not handled properly, you could face an information leak or full-blown database hack. If you decide to implement your own authentication and authorization service, think carefully about how you store user details. You should also make sure you use appropriate hashing algorithms and that the passwords are effectively salted before being stored in the database. You can read a bit about the underlying math in this article.
Explore using a third-party user authentication and authorization service. It helps you focus on what makes your game unique, and it’s especially useful when you want to implement SSO, and social auth. Depending on your platform, you may want to allow a user to log in with a gaming network login, such as the Xbox or PlayStation Network. An auth server can help with this integration.
Using an external auth server ensures that if the gameplay code breaks, the registration continues working, so you can reach out to registered users once the game comes back online. One option for third-party auth is FusionAuth. It keeps your user data secure and provides all the social login integrations your game might need.
If your game architecture allows, it’s worthwhile to explore serverless options like AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, or similar services. They ensure you don’t have to worry about over- or under-provisioning server resources; you pay only for the time you’re servicing traffic. Such services can help you manage your site, whether you get no traffic at all (you won’t pay a dime) or you get a large amount of unplanned traffic. The underlying resources are automatically managed by the serverless infrastructure provider, so you’re free to focus on your core service. This option is an alternative to the autoscaling mentioned above.
There are numerous guides to help you implement authentication and authorization in a serverless infrastructure. JWTs are commonly used in such services, and most third-party auth services like FusionAuth support them.
Launch day is the most important day for your game or web app. If it’s handled correctly, you get a big boost for your business, but if overwhelming registration demand sours the experience for would-be users, your business could be damaged instead.
The best practices listed in this article can help improve the user registration experience and handle spikes in registration traffic on launch day. Even though several of these tips—such as caching, autoscaling, and monitoring—don’t take much time to implement, they can offer large dividends. If you’re prepared to handle traffic when your game launches, you’ll be able to reap the benefits for long afterward.