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Comment by bridgeyman | Hacker News Reader

Where do you host askgolang? I have been working on a go server with websockets too. It seems like websockets cause trouble with Heroku, Google App Engine, and AWS (if you use the ELB).

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This is on an instance of the smallest linode available (1024MB). It sits there with all of my other side projects.

Load average is negligible despite the HN load:

    Load average: 0.04 0.06 0.06

I'm using Postgres on the backend and am not using any caching. This is being reverse proxied by nginx (so that I can host multiple golang projects on the same server over port 80).

I've been working with websockets on AWS for some data intensive bi-directional communication and haven't had any issues with it...However, I don't have it set up as an HTTP listener, I have it set to TCP 80 -> TCP <mylocalport>. The server architecture doesn't matter if a user drifts backend hosts if their connection drops and reestablishes (no stickiness needed). I haven't tried it under the HTTPS setting for SSL connections yet, but if there's flakiness, I know I can just terminate SSL on the ec2 instances instead of the ELB.

Another thing to mention: I believe websockets use up file descriptors. If you are having issues with websockets despite nominal load, it's worth checking if you're exhausting your file descriptors.

I don't know about the architecture of Heroku, GAE, or AWS w/ ELB in terms of supporting the HTTP 1.1 Upgrade request to websockets. Perhaps they all use a reverse proxy that doesn't pass along the Upgrade request? Even nginx didn't support this before ~1.3.13.

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