Scaling websocket node server

Question

I know this question has been asked partially before (How to Scale Node.js WebSocket Redis Server?) but I am wondering if there is any alternatives to redis for rapidly sharing websocket objects between node instances, specifically ws type sockets (https://github.com/einaros/ws). I've tried redis and ran into issues with the fact that the web socket objects are cyclic and difficult to serialise. I then used Crockford's cycle.js (https://github.com/douglascrockford/JSON-js/blob/master/cycle.js), however it seems to strip out the websocket objects methods, as I get an error from node saying "Object object has no method send" after I have read the socket back from redis and retrocycled it. Any help would be much appreciated.

Thanks in advance, James.

Answer 1

IMO you should use messaging queue for that.. e.g (RabbitMQ)

1. Application starts on Node A and Node B and connects to RabbitMQ
2. Client A connects to Node A and subscribe to Queue named XXX Client
3. Client B connects to Node B and subscribe to Queue named XXX
4. Client A sendsmessage to websocket server Websocket Server sends message to Node A
5. Node A publishes messages to RabbitMQ queue XXX
6. Node B receives the message from RabbitMQ as it is subscribed to queue XXX
7. Node B sends message to Client B or publishes the messages to all connected clients on node B

So, all you need is to put Messaging queue in your architecture (RabbitMQ, ZeroMQ) etc