What is the best way to listen to a lot of channels and events using Pusher

Question

I have 40 categories and each category has 10-100 subcategories. By default, the user listens to all categories and subcategories. I want to give each user the ablity to select to unbind from the whole category or from a specific subcategory. So, right now what I have is each category is a channel, and each subcategory is a event.

Now, I have something like each user is bound to 2000-3000 events, and I know this is wrong, so what is the right way to let the user to filter between 3000 events? Is it okay to bind to that many events?

Answer 1

It's important to remember that when you subscribe to a channel all events for the channel will be sent to the client (Pusher - clients), even if you have not bound to the event.

With the information above in mind, I'd recommend using channels to filter data. The overhead when subscribing to a channels isn't great. For example, subscribing to 40 channels wouldn't represent any significant resource usage. You will need to consider if the channels are public (anybody can subscribe) or private where each call to pusher.subscribe( 'private-channel-x' ); will result in an authentication request to your server. There is a multi-auth plugin that allows batching of authentication requests to take place.

One solution is to have each user subscribe to their own notification channel and send them events for the things that they are interested in on that single channel. You can use the multi publish functionality for this, which lets you send the same event on many channels. This may be useful if you wish to send the same event to multiple users. However, this solution may not be as elegant from an information architecture point of view.

The best solution here really depends on your application. But with the above you now have all the facts which will let you make the most efficient choice.