CODEWITHSUNDEEP
xmppchatpushpolling
paxtor
paxtor

Reputation: 331

Developing Chat/Real time web application

I am currently doing my research on building a chat system with more than 10k users connected online. I came across technologies and ways to do it such as jabber(XMPP), websockets, long polling, push. As far as I now, long polling might not work given the number of users. I know there is a lot of ways to accomplish this. I also know that facebook and Google chat systems are developed on XMPP.

I would truly appreciate if anyone could point me to the right direction. I believe all these methods and technologies out there are good depending on the scale of the project. I definitely need performance and scalability.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 1973

Answers (2)

Robin
Robin

Reputation: 24282

You are comparing a fruit basket and three different variety of oranges.

XMPP is the only protocol that you have mentioned that actually is designed to support a chat system (of which many exist). The others are simply asynchronous messaging protocols/techniques. XMPP already supports http based chat via BOSH. Without a doubt, it will also support WebSockets when the specification is finalized. There is actually a draft of this already written, but at this point it appears to be a draft using a draft, so there will probably be few, if any, implementations.

Using XMPP would allow you to build on a proven technology for implementing a chat system and would allow you to choose what transport you want to use "under the hood". You haven't actually said whether you need a http based transport or not, but with XMPP you can use the stock tcp socket based transport or a http based one (BOSH) with the knowledge that it will also support WebSockets in the future.

The other benefit is of course that this is a widely used standard that will allow reuse of existing clients, servers and libraries in pretty much all popular (and not so popular) languages and platforms.

Scalability is not too much of a concern with the numbers you are quoting, as most (maybe all) existing xmpp servers will handle that many users.

Upvotes: 1

Lior Cohen
Lior Cohen

Reputation: 9055

I've used Socket.io together with NodeJS for such a chat application. It scaled to over 10K concurrent users on moderate servers and there was a lot of room to grow.

This does depend on your limitations, tho.

  • What kind of hardware are you planning on using?
  • Which operating system would power your servers?
  • Which client platforms are you targeting?
  • Do you have an existing infrastructure you need to fit this into?
  • Do you have a previously selected programming language?
  • The existing skill sets your team members have and your team's ability to adopt new platforms and languages if necessary.

Take all of the above into consideration when making your decision.

Personally, I've found XMPP to be quite adequate, but a bit bloated for my purposes. YMMV.

Upvotes: 2

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