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

socketcluster.io

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

#4

Post by sudovoodoo »

From personal experience -- switching from socket.io to socketcluster.io for our conferencing platform was a life saver. Its so much more stable & performant its crazy. We also use it to run our webrtc video chat platform which works great as well. Cant say enough good things about this.

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

#5

Post by sudovoodoo »

sudovoodoo wrote: post #4

From personal experience -- switching from socket.io to socketcluster.io for our conferencing platform was a life saver. Its so much more stable & performant its crazy. We also use it to run our webrtc video chat platform which works great as well. Cant say enough good things about this.

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

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

#6

Post by EGreg »

sudovoodoo wrote: post #4

From personal experience -- switching from socket.io to socketcluster.io for our conferencing platform was a life saver. Its so much more stable & performant its crazy. We also use it to run our webrtc video chat platform which works great as well. Cant say enough good things about this.

How long has it been around? Why is it better than socket.io 2?

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

#7

Post by EGreg »

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 distributed way so things are partitioned based on the stream you subscribe to. If you aren't online you can subscribe to get offline notifications delivered to your device or other endpoints (like custom nodes that would act on notifications like IFTTT).

So, given that we have the infrastructure - we use PHP for request handling, MySQL for persistence, Node for background service to do socket push and notifications... what does this offer over socket.io? We implement our own rules for subscribing to streams.

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

#9

Post by jontammeh »

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.

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

#10

Post by cryptica »

EGreg wrote: 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 you did) and then decided that it would be easier to just use something open source instead of writing their own.

There is a lot more to a realtime stack than just the bidirectional transport.

If you already have a fully working system and you don't need any new features, then you don't necessarily need to migrate to the shiny new tool ;p

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