Question

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.

Answer 1

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.