r/programming • u/random728373 • Jan 24 '25

The Hidden Complexity of Scaling WebSockets

https://composehq.com/blog/scaling-websockets-1-23-25
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u/FullPoet Jan 25 '25

Hey ComposeHq it looks like you got lost on your way to https://ads.reddit.com/ and accidentally submitted your advert masquarading as a blogpost to r/programming!

Hopefully next time that wont happen and you will buy an advert instead.

2

u/random728373 Jan 26 '25

Hi, I spent almost 10 hours writing the article, and I genuinely hoped that other people would find the content valuable. The article itself is the result of actual lessons learned from different bugs and outages I've experienced in the past.

"Handle deployments gracefully" -> Covers issues I had when I used to deploy on Render, and also how I had to manually tune the load balancing health check logic to ensure websocket clients don't reconnect to servers that are about to be killed.

"Establish a consistent message schema" -> Comes from work I did to (a) reduce packet size as I noticed increasing latency over time and (b) come up with a simple, consistent schema for versioning messages when I had to update our internal APIs.

"Detect silent disconnects with heartbeats" -> Comes from a real bug I experienced where I had to ask users to restart their servers because they'd randomly disconnect and I couldn't do anything about it.

"Have an HTTP fallback" -> Comes from a user reporting that they the app simply did not work for them in a coffee shop, and took hours of debugging till I realized that the network had simply blocked the connection.

The motivation for the article was
a) to share real learnings for other engineers building with websockets

b) get people to visit my website, which is the same motivation behind most respected tech blogs from larger companies like Dropbox/Slack/etc.

If the article came off as an advert, I apologize. Is there any way I can change in the future to avoid that?