Comment by joshxyz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by joshxyz | Hacker News Reader

I'm currently experimenting with React and WebSockets and they seem to be a perfect fit.

No need to write wrappers for Fetch, network errors and reconnects can be handled on high-level, handlers for each message type can be mounted and unmounted on useEffect hooks, all back-end jobs can notify the user in realtime, all session-based client-side data can be updated in realtime (in single or multiple open tabs).

I'm also using uWebSockets.js[0] which is great in terms of API design, stability, and performance. Their benchmarks[1] are just convincing. Highly recommend people using ExpressJS / Koa / whatever to try it.

[0] https://github.com/uNetworking/uWebSockets.js/

[1] https://github.com/uNetworking/uWebSockets/tree/master/bench...

We are using Phoenix Channels[0] for a websocket-based app and it's very easy to setup/work with. It should also scale easily.

[0] https://hexdocs.pm/phoenix/channels.html

When I was researching stuff I've read a lot of good things about Phoenix, I honestly think socket.io and ws NodeJS libraries are inferior compared to that.

It's just almost pure luck that the guy who wrote uWebSockets (written in C & C++) also wrote NodeJS bindings, otherwise we'll be stuck with the ones with sub-par api, docs, and performance.

> and they seem to be a perfect fit

Needs a fairly capable server though, I suppose. One that can handle lots and lots of open websocket connections.

Guess it really depends on how many concurrent users you expect to have...

Sounds like 30 GiB RAM for 1 million concurrent users is not unreasonable:

https://stackoverflow.com/a/17453704

Yes that's some genuine concern. Though on B2B and B2C SaaS where you got paying users, I think each of them deserve a websocket, and it could* alleviate some headaches for developers.

* Anecdotal of course, at least for us.

Also your load balancer stack needs to support it, which is becoming less of a problem these days but there's still some stragglers. You could also end up with an imbalance where some servers have a lot of connections and others have few.

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