"It grew week-over-week to well over 1,000,000 concurrent connections (chat + notifications). Luckily, Pusher worked well and was fairly inexpensive" I'd love to find out what they mean by inexpensive because from pusher.com/pricing 10,000 connections is $399/month. I have no idea what 100x connections would cost (hopefully not $39,900/month). Frankly, the pricing of pusher and other competitors seems insane to me. I was considering pusher for my startup, but I realized that if my startup became mildly successful, I'd be stuck with a bill that would force my business to rapidly build another solution or take on excessive debt. Why begin with prototype technology that could lead your startup (if successful) to become insolvent?<p>It's not as if there is a shortage of available tech for handling socket connections. It took about a week for me to learn enough node.js and build a service with socket.io that did everything I needed.
SocketCluster's API is similar to that of Pusher so it can be a good self-hosted alternative: <a href="http://socketcluster.io/" rel="nofollow">http://socketcluster.io/</a> - It's also designed with scalability in mind. You do have to manage presence yourself though but that shouldn't be too difficult (You can keep track of user presence in your own database - That could actually be an advantage since you can go ahead and use that presence data easily on your back-end to do other stuff - Easy to integrate).<p>We're currently working with a couple of fast growing startups so it's getting traction (still early adopter stage though). We'll be announcing our native iOS client near the end of this week. (disclosure: I'm the main author)
If they really had 1 million concurrent active users "assuming 5% of our simultaneous actives were chatting, that we needed to be ready to support up to 50,000 users chatting at once", and were seeing growth "chat was an instant hit. It grew week-over-week to well over 50,000 concurrent connections", why did they shut down?
There isn't enough of this information out there. Scaling things is incredibly hard, a lot more difficult than some would think. Not only do you have limitations around the software, but hardware and the problems that come with scaling hardware. Great article, looking forward to some more specifics (load balancing, memory/cpu/disk issues) in future articles.
This isn't great for Layer. I think most companies want to own their chat stack. Its not complex enough, like say Stripe, to need a 3rd party. Has anyone used Layer and felt they added value?
How is this news? Chat has been around for a long time and Pusher is nothing more than a cash grab for lazy developers. You can easily get better performance, scalability, and customizability, for much cheaper with socket.io and and a caching and/or messaging service (Redis, *MQ).
I recently discovered Pusher and was able to build and ship an entirely new feature in under a week. They have good documentation, thought provoking example apps and simple pricing.<p>Couldn't be more impressed with them. Keep it up!
Really interesting that Pusher didn't choke on that!<p>Also patting my own back for thinking about chat session based on sorted user id's (for 2+ person chat) on my own once also. Felt like a nice way to do it, unsure if that breaks down at any point.
I'm making a real-time communication iOS app, we're using Firebase[1] to quickly build it's real-time features.<p>There's to be a lot of hate on here towards using such services. Is it really a better option (flexibility, owning your data & price wise) to spend the time building your own system and having to hire engineers later on to manage/develop it?<p>[1] <a href="https://www.firebase.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.firebase.com</a>