[mnutt]

For many workloads that's fine, but it sounds like some people have found that using the OS socket handling doesn't distribute very evenly among processes in some cases: http://strongloop.com/strongblog/whats-new-in-node-js-v0-12-...

Edit: more concise explanation, in the context of SO_REUSEPORT: http://lwn.net/Articles/542718/

[zimbatm]

Yes it's true that socket sharing is not optimal for load-balancing scenarios. Here you would use 1 crank/socketmaster process per process that you want to run and a haproxy in front. Their goal is not to do load balancing but to not disrupt existing (web)socket connections when a new process is started.