Server-sent events

In fact, I think it made a better chat protocol, when we built a chat system at a previous job, similar to Slack. We ended up leveraging SSE to push updates to channels and traditional HTTP requests to send data to the server, resulting in lower latency and less overhead on the server side. We did this because we found the following to be true:

- At any given time, there are far more people reading chat messages than writing them

- What matters is that updates after being sent to everyone else is that their pretty close to instantaneous but you had a 500ms window to allow for the server to receive a new message and then propagate it out. Therefore, for the sender, you update the UI optimistically so they aren't waiting for a response, and everyone else will get it in ~500ms and its imperceptible

- one downside: its harder (we never figured it out before I left) to do indicators for when someone is typing. That really does seem to require two way real time connections

Tangentially, I’m having a massive problem with SSE datastreams erroring out about two minutes in for “ERR: Network chunk encoding” reasons, anyone else seen this before?

I've always appreciated that it's just a simple line-oriented UTF-8 text protocol. Binary transfers are handled more efficiently with something else. Or just base64 the payload if it's not that big of a deal.