GAMEPERF05-BP02 Move non-latency-sensitive compute tasks to asynchronous workflows

When you are optimizing the performance for your game, it is important to keep in mind that only some of the interactions between the client and the game backend must be performed in a synchronous manner. You should consider each feature from the perspective of the player experience and determine whether certain interactions require synchronous communications, which are blocking and resource intensive, or whether those features can be implemented in an asynchronous manner. When you implement network calls, use an asynchronous, non-blocking approach. Additionally, your game backend should also be configured to perform work in an efficient manner by offloading tasks to queues and prioritizing fast responses to clients where possible.

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

Implementation guidance

For example, updating a leader board at the end of a player session can be implemented asynchronously so that the client does not need to wait for the leader board update to complete. Instead, implement this asynchronously on the game client, and consider designing your backend service to push these types of operations into queues, such as Amazon SQS. With this architecture, configure your backend to accept the request, enqueue it in SQS which helps durably store messages for asynchronous processing, and promptly reply to the client. When the leader board update is completed, the backend can send an update to the game client so that the player's view of the leader board is updated.

Alternatively, the player can simply visit your game's leader board screen to retrieve the latest data, which can issue a web request to your backend to retrieve the latest data from cache.

Implementation steps

Resources