[moe]

Feedback?

How about just not making wild claims about byzantine fantasy designs that you never tested under any kind of load.

There has been a lot of research in messaging architectures, some of the best message brokers are free. As it happens, none of them have any resemblance to your proposed design.

RabbitMQ has been benchmarked[1] to 1 million messages/sec on 30 servers and works very well for many people.

Why not start with that?

[1] http://blog.pivotal.io/pivotal/products/rabbitmq-hits-one-mi...

[elierotenberg]

This benchmark is indeed very interesting.

I think I may have failed to express my point, though. I'm not building a message queue, as it is certainly a very hard problem that has been engineered for years by people way smarter than me :) I'm merely leveraging the goodness of their implementations (in my case redis, but RabbitMQ is also an option I've considered explicitly in my post).

The chat is a contrived example to show that even under high load, full-scale flux over the wire is a reasonable option. As for "any kind of serious load", well, maybe my example fails to meet the requirements, but unless I'm building Facebook, I think I've faced something serious enough to be able to think about my next step.

[jacquesm]

If you're building a large scale chat service you are implicitly also building a message queue.

And as for the high load you haven't actually experienced high load until you put this into production with a million users.

To make that clearer: you can design a system for any number of users, the only relevant question is how it held up in practice and as long as you haven't had a million concurrent users you just don't know (and probably it won't).

[moe]

I'm not building a message queue

That may be the kernel of the problem here; you built a subset of a message queue without realising it.

RabbitMQ has a websocket plugin[1]. Just make your javascript connect directly to a RabbitMQ cluster and you have a solid, scalable foundation - almost for free.

[1] http://www.rabbitmq.com/blog/2012/05/14/introducing-rabbitmq...

[bsaul]

I was under the impression that the design was indeed never tested, but at least the author had some real life experience of building a moderately sized chat service.

I can understand why people like you are pissed by this kind of blog post which reads a bit too much like an ad, but i think it's still good that people are trying to reinvent the wheel with completely new technologies, because sometimes it leads to surprising results.

Maybe the OP should add some warnings in the blog, saying that it's an highly experimental design that people shouldn't try to use for their own projects at the moment...