View a markdown version of this page

GAMEOPS03-BP02 Conduct performance engineering before every release (or at least for major releases) - Games Industry Lens
Implementation guidance

GAMEOPS03-BP02 Conduct performance engineering before every release (or at least for major releases)

Performance engineering is the process of monitoring multiple key operational metrics of an app to discover optimization opportunities that can further improve the application's performance. This is an iterative process that starts with testing, followed by optimizing code, its dependencies, associated processes, its host operating system, and the underlying infrastructure.

Level of risk exposed if this best practice is not established: High

Implementation guidance

To conduct a deeper analysis of the app's performance, integrate an application performance monitoring (APM) or debugging tool in the app code that can isolate issues and reduce troubleshooting time by tracking its behavior for anomalies across the flows of the app. APM tools are also able to identify slow performing methods and external operations.

AWS X-Ray assists developers with their performance engineering activities, like identifying performance bottlenecks and analyzing and debugging production errors. You can use X-Ray to understand how your application and its underlying services are performing and identify and troubleshoot the root cause of performance issues and errors. Through numerous rounds of load tests, in which the application and its infrastructure is gradually loaded with synthetic player traffic, various system bottlenecks, app errors, exceptions, OS problems, and other issues are identified that may have not been found during other QA tests.

For critical events like game launches, content releases, promotions, and major in-game events, use AWS Countdown, which provides implementation guidance based on playbooks built by games experts to verify operational readiness, mitigate potential risks, and plan for capacity needs. AWS Countdown also has a premium support option that offers enhanced support and options like engineers to optimize your infrastructure.

Implementation steps

  • Performance engineering involves evaluating and monitoring key operational metrics to verify that your application's code, processes, operating system, and infrastructure are functioning as expected. Pre-production review also assists to define baseline performance at different levels of simulated usage.

  • Discover and track key metrics like utilization, services, I/O, processes and such by using system tools such as sar, top, vmstat, sysstat, netstat, and Performance Monitor.

  • Track your application's performance and behavior using APM tools like AWS X-Ray to isolate issues, identify bottlenecks, and debug production errors.

  • For critical events like game launches, subscribe to AWS Countdown (IEM) for architectural and operational guidance, on-demand operational support, and to identify risks and plan mitigations.