Extreme Performance Tuning for Spiky Gaming Traffic

Introduction

Midships completed a rigorous performance tuning initiative on the Ping AIS platform for a top-tier gaming institution client. The goal was to validate that the platform could sustain spiky loads for short periods of time, while maintaining reliable response times.

This initiative not only confirmed Ping AIS’s technical robustness but also reinforced a foundation for enhanced customer trust, and long-term operational resilience. Ping AIS was deployed using the Midships Accelerator which has scalability, resiliency and security hardened best practices baked into it.

The Challenges

The testing addressed several key challenges:

• High Load Expectations: Simulating load with 250,000 actively authenticating users within a short period, with the system supporting 2.5 million user sessions to ensure the system can handle the intense demand typical in high-traffic gaming environments.

• Diverse Transaction Demands: Critical customer journeys – such as FIDO authentication, high security login with SMS OTP flow, and OAuth2 Authorization Code flows – were invoked mimicking real-world use. Notably, the login journey was stress-tested to achieve a peak load of 1255 Journeys Per Second (JPS) over one hour. To put this in perspective - this means, in one hour, we could have over 4.5 million customers logged in and transacting within the system.

• Resource Management: Maintaining optimal performance even as user sessions and tokens accumulate over time was essential for continuous, smooth operations. Hence, the load tests were executed with an empty token store and another test was executed while token store contained 2 million tokens, and token purge was in progress. There was no drop in performance in both cases.

The Solution

Midships implemented a comprehensive performance tuning of the Ping AIS platform. We tuned the application deployment, memory spaces, connection pools, and application configuration to achieve the required throughput.

This was made easy due to the use of the Midships Ping AIS Accelerator, which provides out of the box compute customization, scaling and makes performance tuning easy due to the file-based configuration of the platform including environmental variability. This ensures performance tuning can be reliably built and applied into each environment as needed.

For measurement, a key innovation was the introduction of the concept of Journeys Per Second (JPS). Unlike traditional measures that count individual HTTP requests, JPS captures the complete customer journey – for example, a login journey may consist of multiple calls but is viewed as a single, cohesive experience. This approach provides a more accurate representation of the end-user experience.

Key Achievements Include:

• 1255 JPS: The login journey reached a peak of 1255 Journeys Per Second (9400 combined transactions per second) over one hour.

• Consistent Performance: Response times were consistently maintained under 50ms average response time.

• Minimal Error Rate: The tests achieved an error rate of less than 0.1%, ensuring reliable performance under load.

• Future Proofing of Platform: The existing CIAM platform received a maximum peak load of 666 Login Journeys Per Second over the entire last year. So the business wanted to confirm that the Ping AIS can support 2x of the peak load and identify the headroom further scale out. Additionally headroom can also be provisioned for even more load, using Midships Accelerator horizontal pod autoscaler capability.

These outcomes confirm that the platform is not only ready for current high-demand conditions but also provides ample headroom for unexpected spikes and future growth.

Collaboration and Business Impact

The initiative was executed in close collaboration with the client's testing team. This partnership has delivered a solution that gives the client confidence of being able to support double the peak load seen in all of 2024.

The successful testing translates into a more scalable and resilient infrastructure, and enhanced customer trust, all of which are critical for giving the business confidence for full adoption of the Ping AIS self-managed platform, delivered using Midships world-leading accelerator for deploying and managing this product at scale.

Mission Successful - High-speed and Reliability

The performance testing validated that Ping AIS can sustain heavy loads without compromising speed or reliability. Achieving a peak of 1255 JPS for the login journey, with response times under 50 ms average response time and an error rate of less than 0.1%, underscores the platform’s readiness for high-demand environments.

The above results confirm Midships have made a future-proof solution that offers significant headroom for sudden spikes and long-term growth. This initiative lays a solid foundation for continued operational excellence and strategic business advantage in the competitive gaming industry.

If you are struggling to achieve your desired throughput on Ping AIS, get in touch with sales@midships.io to see how we can help you tune your Ping AIS deployment for better stability and customer experience.