My SaaS has been using WebSockets for the last 9 years. I plan to stop using them and move to very simple HTTP-based polling. I found that scalability isn't a problem (it rarely is these days). The real problem is crappy network equipment all over the world that will sometimes break websockets in strange and mysterious ways. I guess not all network equipment vendors test with long-lived HTTP websocket connections wit…
This is likely a misconfiguration or bugs on your end. Our products use WebSockets extensively for both business logic and for media delivery. We have significant traffic, including from 3rd world countries with extremely poor networks. When the server and the browser are proper, the reliability of the WebSocket protocol and the software stack is basically not different from raw TCP. When we have issues, the bugs are always on our end due to
1) ingress software (firewalls, WAPs, reverse proxies, TLS termination).
2) HTTP server protocol parsing and processing of the WebSocket data stream.
3) Web/HTTP framework issues.
We never have any issues due to networks on the users end, apart from the quality of the connection itself.
When seen from the equipment side, the WebSocket connection is an opaque stream of data. No different from a fps gameplay or a livestream. The equipment can break it but then the underlying HTTP breaks as well, giving very clear errors in browsers. Reconnection and keepalive for WebSockets in browsers are very robust which you can actually prove by tests...