I'm working on a card game and its server. There will be a lobby with many tables and many players. The only issue is, how can I see how it might handle 100's of concurrent users without hundreds of concurrent users?
How is this sort of thing usually done?
Two words: headless client.
Basically it's an AI driven client that's had the all graphics bypassed so that you can run many multiples of copies on a machine, you can even run them on servers because you never initialize the graphics at all.
Above all those clients is a supervisor that is responsible for starting, monitoring and stopping all the clients to test, log and re-run after client crashes.
I think you are worried about the wrong things Milo. I see from your other questions you are planning on writing the game is C++.
Even a not very well coded sever written in a scripting language would be able to handle 100's if not 1000's of requests with out apparent lag in a card game.
These kinds of technical details are probably not going to be a big problem. If they do become a problem it would only be a day or two of optimization or moving things around a little. But only after the game is finished and only after you have identified what exactly the problem is..
Writing a headless client now to simulate lots of uses is a waste of time.. focus on the really hard problems like..
