Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: SocketCluster.io – flexible open-source real-time server with pub/sub

socketcluster.io

21–30 of 41 posts

Re: Show HN: SocketCluster.io – flexible open-source real-time server with pub/sub

#21
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Should say that we horizontally scale this thing pretty heavily using the sc-redis module. Elasticache + ELB + 4 EC2 Instances = support for 5000+ person conferences :D

This sounds interesting. Do you have a web-site? Open source?

If you check their comment history (which is very brief) you'll see they comment on a job posting for Talkfusion.

Re: Show HN: SocketCluster.io – flexible open-source real-time server with pub/sub

#22
post #7

This seems very impressive, but I wonder why we would want to switch to it from socket.io in our use case. We have built an open source platform that takes care of all the usual stuff you need when building realtime social apps. From the client side caching down to the pubsub, message ordering, security, and pushing updates via socket.io back to the client and updating the caches. It is designed to work in a distribu…

I'm the main author of SC. Your system does sound similar to SC - It seems to be a pretty standard realtime architecture - Those who started building their realtime systems with Socket.io (as you did) often end up with something similar to what you describe except it takes a lot of work to get there... A lot of people who use SC decided to make the switch because they started implementing their own pub/sub stack (as…

I'm curious because I have a relatively new socket.io based application (we went into production in the last month). How difficult is the migration path? (If it's something i can do in an afternoon, I'd be willing to try it out)

Re: Show HN: SocketCluster.io – flexible open-source real-time server with pub/sub

#23

Interesting these are coming around now. Some services (i.e. Pubnub) have been doing this (for money) for a long time and what I noticed were at the end of the day, the use cases were actually rather limited. Apart from stock quotes, bitcoin quotes and multiplayer games - polling just isn't that bad. And it's actually a very good place to start when developing as it's simple.

Even if you don't need sub-second updates polling is still very wasteful. Your typical HTTP header is 700-800 bytes, so every 100,000 requests you're sending 75 megabytes of data you don't need to.

Websockets require 2 bytes, so those same 100,000 requests send only 200 kilobytes of additional data. Also it's worth noting that with Websockets data is only sent when there is new data to send. Saving you even more bandwidth.

Plus with services like Pubnub & Pusher websockets are really simply to get started with now as well. I would argue they're actually easier to use than polling.

Re: Show HN: SocketCluster.io – flexible open-source real-time server with pub/sub

#25
I tried SocketCluster for a highly scalable chat platform and it couldn't handle very big conversations. SocketCluster is good but the bottleneck here was NodeJS. I finnaly used Nginx PushStream to do the sub and the pub was handled by NodeJS (with the authentication). It has been used to host chat room with more than 70,000 concurrent clients, scaled on 7 m3.large EC2 instances and one relatively small Redis server.

The platform is opensource and come with a lot of higher level features for chat usage: https://github.com/geekuillaume/chatup

Re: Show HN: SocketCluster.io – flexible open-source real-time server with pub/sub

#26

Am I the only one who thinks we need a better name for this kind of thing than realtime server ?

There's always a pedant. :) You're probably right, but I think that ship has sailed. Projects and companies have been using "realtime" to mean "push" or "update a UI without a refresh button" for years.

Re: Show HN: SocketCluster.io – flexible open-source real-time server with pub/sub

#27

Am I the only one who thinks we need a better name for this kind of thing than realtime server ?

There's always a pedant. :) You're probably right, but I think that ship has sailed. Projects and companies have been using "realtime" to mean "push" or "update a UI without a refresh button" for years.

Well yeah but we should know better. Pubsub != realtime.

Re: Show HN: SocketCluster.io – flexible open-source real-time server with pub/sub

#28

Am I the only one who thinks we need a better name for this kind of thing than realtime server ?

There's always a pedant. :) You're probably right, but I think that ship has sailed. Projects and companies have been using "realtime" to mean "push" or "update a UI without a refresh button" for years.

I admit naming things is hard. I'm very often pedantic! But I don't think it's pedantic to say, "Hey, guys, this name we're using is kind of shitty."

Re: Show HN: SocketCluster.io – flexible open-source real-time server with pub/sub

#29

Interesting these are coming around now. Some services (i.e. Pubnub) have been doing this (for money) for a long time and what I noticed were at the end of the day, the use cases were actually rather limited. Apart from stock quotes, bitcoin quotes and multiplayer games - polling just isn't that bad. And it's actually a very good place to start when developing as it's simple.

Even if you don't need sub-second updates polling is still very wasteful. Your typical HTTP header is 700-800 bytes, so every 100,000 requests you're sending 75 megabytes of data you don't need to. Websockets require 2 bytes, so those same 100,000 requests send only 200 kilobytes of additional data. Also it's worth noting that with Websockets data is only sent when there is new data to send. Saving you even more band…

Not to mention things like logging and metrics overhead if you're logging every request at multiple levels (application, NGINX, HAProxy).
Post reply on HN