CODEWITHSUNDEEP
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Rahul Munjal
Rahul Munjal

Reputation: 2703

Max no of connections using web sockets

I am developing a web application using web-sockets which needs real time data.

The number of clients using the web application will be over 100 000.

Server side web socket coding is done in Java. Can a single web-socket server handle this amount of connections?

If not, how can I achieve this. I have to use web sockets only.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 1724

Answers (2)

Mihai Rotaru
Mihai Rotaru

Reputation: 63

As FrankG explained above, the number of WebSocket connections is depended on the use case.

Here are two benchmarks using MigratoryData WebSocket Server for two very different use cases that also detail system configuration (let's note however that system configuration is only a detail and the high scalability is achieved by the architecture of the MigratoryData which has been designed for real-time websites with millions of users).

In one use case MigratoryData scaled up to 10 million concurrent connections (while delivering ~1 Gbps messaging):

https://mrotaru.wordpress.com/2016/01/20/migratorydata-makes-its-c10m-scalability-record-more-robust-with-zing-jvm-achieve-near-1-gbps-messaging-to-10-million-concurrent-users-with-only-15-milliseconds-consistent-latency/

In another use case MigratoryData scaled up to 192,000 (while delivering ~9 Gbps):

https://mrotaru.wordpress.com/2013/03/27/migratorydata-demonstrates-record-breaking-8x-higher-websocket-scalability-than-competition/

These numbers are achieved on a single instance of MigratoryData WebSocket Server. MigratoryData can be clustered so you can also scale horizontally to any number of subscribers in an effective way.

Full disclosure: I work for MigratoryData.

Upvotes: 0

FrankG
FrankG

Reputation: 543

WebSocket servers, like any other TCP-based server, can open huge numbers of connections. They can be file-descriptor-based. You can find out the max (system-wide) FDs easily enough on Linux:

% cat /proc/sys/fs/file-max 165038

There are system-wide and there are kernel parameters for user limits (and shell-level things like "ulimit"). Btw, you'll need to edit /etc/sysctl.conf to increase your FD mods during a reboot.

And of course you can increase this number to whatever you want (with the proportional impact on kernel memory).

Or servers can do tricks to multiplex a single connection.

But the real question is, what is the profile of the data that will flow over the connection? Will you have 100K users getting 1 64-byte message per day? Or are those 100K users getting 50 1K messages a second? Can the WebSocket server shard its connections over multiple NICs (ie, spread the I/O load)? Are the messages all encrypted and therefore need a lot of CPU? How easily can you cluster your WebSocket server so failover is easy for you and painless for your users? Is your server mission/business critical?... that is, can you afford to have 100K users disappear if a disaster occurs? There are many questions to consider when you thinking about scalability of a WebSocket server.

In our labs, we can create millions of connections on a server (and many more in a cluster). In the real-world, there are other 'scale' factors to consider in a production deployment besides file descriptors. Hope this helps.

Full disclosure: I work for Kaazing, a WS vendor.

Upvotes: 2

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