Before starting to write my application I need to know what to do when a single node.js instance (express and (socket.io or nowjs)) isn’t enough anymore.
You might tell me now, that I shouldn’t care about scale until it’s about time but I don’t want to develop an application and run into trouble because you can’t easily scale socket.io or nowjs across multiple instances.
I recently read that socket.io now supports a way to scale using Redis (which I also have no experience in). Nowjs is build on to of socket.io – does it work the same way? On nowjs.org you can read that a “distributed version of NowJS” is under development and is going to cost money.
If you need to scale node, the first place people usually start is putting a load balancer in front of multiple node instances. The standard for this today is nginx, though I would would like to check out the node balancer ‘bouncy’ that came out recently. Here’s an example of someone using the nginx reverse proxy to manage multiple node instances:
Node.js + Nginx – What now?
The second thing you mention is socket.io/nowjs. Depending on how you’re using these frameworks, you could get into a situation where you want to share context between clients who are hitting multiple node.js instances. If this is the case, I would recommend using a persistent store, like redis, to bridge the gap between your node instances. Here’s an example:
How to reuse redis connection in socket.io?
Hopefully this is enough information and reading to get you started, let me know if you have any questions.
Happy coding!