I am a real fan of using the real client to do load testing. Your QA engineers will spend a lot of time building regression tests that verify the behavior of the game is still the same and no new bugs have been introduced. That entails adding scripting or player behavior "simulation" to the game code, but also includes creating the scripts that test the functionality of the game. Those test cases are really important and ideally cover almost all of the game functionality. And they have to be kept up to date as the code in the game changes.
Why not reuse all that work to help load test the server? The scaffolding, client hooks, and test cases?
One of my favorite ways of doing this is to have a test driver that picks random test cases and throws them at the server as fast as possible. Even if the test case involves sleeping or waiting for something like the character walking across some area of the game, if you run enough of them at the same time, you can generate significant load. And it is going to be more realistic than any other kind of test prior to having zillions of real players. It also saves you from having to reproduce the protocol and behavior of the real client and maintain it as the game team evolves everything.
Why not? Even if you take the time to make a headless version of the client, it is probably going to be so resource heavy that you will have trouble finding enough machinery to really ramp up. Most games are designed to tick as fast as possible to give the best framerate, but a headless client doesn't draw, so that is a waste of CPU. Some games rely on the timing intrinsic in animations to control walk speed or action/reaction times for interactions. But you want to strip out as much content as possible to save memory. Clearly there is a bunch of work needed to reduce the footprint of even a headless client. But they really are useful.
One thing you can do to make them more useful is construct a mini server cluster and see how it stands up to as many clients as you can scavenge.
You can get hold of more hardware than you might think by "borrowing" it at night from the corporate pool of workstations. You will need permission, and you will want a fool proof packaging so your clients can be installed (and auto-updated) without manual intervention or a sophisticated user. There is nothing like a robot army to bring your server to its knees. IT doesn't like this idea very much because they like to use night time network bandwidth for doing backup and stuff.
Another important trick is to observe the *slope* of performance changes relative to the change in load you throw at the server. If the marginal effect (incremental server load divided by incremental client load) is > 1 you have a problem. Some people call this non-linear or non-scalable performance. Although, to be technical, it is non-unitary. Non-linear means it is even worse that y = a*x + b. E.g. polynomial (x^2), or exponential (y = a^x). Generally you can find the low hanging fruit pretty easily. If the first 500 connected clients caused a memory increase of 100 MB, but the second 500 caused consumed 200 MB you have a problem. Obviously this applies to CPU, bandwidth and latency. And don't forget to observe DB latency as you crank up both the number of clients and the amount of data already in the DB. You may have forgotten an index.
But you may still not have enough insight, even given all this. The next step could be what I call a light-weight replay client or a wedge-client. The idea is to instrument the headless client, or graphical client and record the parameters being passed into key functions like message send, or web service calls. You are inserting a wedge between the game code and the message passing code. The real client can then be used to create a log of all the interesting data that is needed to stress the server. You would then create a replay client that uses only the lower level libraries. It would read the logs, passing the recorded parameters into a generic function that reproduces the message traffic and web requests. It doesn't have to understand what it is doing. The next step is to replace the values of key parameters to simulate a variety of players. You could use random player ids, or spend some more time having the replay client understand the sequences of logs and server responses. E.g. it could copy a session ID from a server response into all further requests.
Since you are wedging into existing source code, this approach is way easier than doing a network level recording and playback. That would require writing packet parsing code, and creating a state machine to try to simulate what the real client was doing. Very messy.
You might still not be able to replay enough load. Perhaps you don't have enough front end boxes purchased yet, but you want to stress your core server. The DB or event processing system. We use a JMS bus (it is great for publish/subscribe semantics that allows for loose coupling between components) to tie most things together on the back end. We built a record/replay system that pulls apart the JMS messages and does parameters replacement much like the wedge client described above. It is pretty simple to simulate thousands of players banging away. Not every client event results in a back end event that affects the DB.
So what we are planning on doing is:
a) build a mini-cluster with just a few front end boxes
b) use QA's regression test cases to drive them to their knees looking for bad marginal resource usage
c) use wedge recordings and replay if needed for even more load on the front end boxes
d) use the JMS message replay system to drive the event system and DB to its knees, also looking for bad marginal usage.
e) do some shady arithmetic to convince ourselves that the simulated client count that resulted in X% utilization of our test cluster will allow us to get to our target client count in the remaining 100-X% utilization available and the new hardware we plan to have in production.
