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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-11T23:51:36+00:00

I want to make an app that relies in socket.io to offer real-time collaborative

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I want to make an app that relies in socket.io to offer real-time collaborative editing and I wonder which of these cases is better/faster:

<textarea id="some-id" onkeypress="broadcast()" ... >Type your text here</textarea>
  • every time a change is made the client broadcasts the whole input with the volatile flag, so if a message is lost, the next one will replace it.
  • every time a change is made the client broadcasts only that change and other clients apply it.

Also, are there any other APIs/frameworks/plugins that I can use rather than socket-io for collaborative document editing?
Thank you.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Let me answer your question a year after you posted this, because you’re probably very impatient by now!

    I think you would be better of with sending the change only.

    • If two persons are typing at the same time, you will lose data if you’re overwriting everything, even with very low latency. That is unacceptable.
    • Without the volatile flag, the latency will be already very low, like a fraction of a second. (Also depends on the user’s connection, of course). Remote persons will probably not notice these tiny delays.
    • Documents may get large, so if someone is happily typing away in a big document, you’re sending a lot of data around, which is not efficient.

    Socket.IO is pretty good for this job: It has great cross-browser compatibility and the overhead is acceptable. If you’re only targeting browsers that support HTML5’s Websocket, you could use a Websocket package for node.js.

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