SocketCluster Alternatives

SocketCluster reviews and mentions

• Highly scalable pub/sub and RPC SDK optimized for async/await
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 14 Apr 2025
• You might not need WebSockets
  11 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 11 Apr 2025

  The problem with HTTP2 is that the server-push aspect was tacked on top of an existing protocol as an afterthought. Also, because HTTP is a resource transfer protocol, it adds a whole bunch of overheads like request and response headings which aren't always necessary but add to processing time. The primary purpose of HTTP2 was to allow servers to preemptively push files/resources to clients to avoid round-trip latency; to reduce the reliance on script bundles.

  WebSockets is a simpler protocol built from the ground up for bidirectional communication. It provides a lot more control over the flow of data as everything passes over a single connection which has a single lifecycle. It makes it a lot easier to manage state and to recover cleanly from a lost connection when you only have one logical connection. It makes it easier to process messages in a specific order and to do serial processing of messages.

  I considered the possibility of switching the transport to HTTP2 for https://socketcluster.io/ years ago, but it's a fundamentally more complex protocol which adds unnecessary overheads and introduces new security challenges so it wasn't worth it.

• Exponential Rate Limiting
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 12 Sep 2024

  For WebSockets, using SocketCluster (https://socketcluster.io), it's possible to queue up all requests from the same client and then detect and respond to high backpressure spikes (e.g. by disconnecting the client and/or recording the incident).

  You can combine different approaches like limiting the number of connections from a single IP within a certain timeframe and also limiting the backpressure.

  The ability to measure and respond to extreme backpressure spikes on a per-end-user basis is highly valuable because backpressure in SocketCluster takes into account the processing time of client requests.

  A common strategy that spammers use is to identify and invoke the most expensive endpoints in your system.

  A lot of people still don't understand the value proposition of being able to process requests from clients in-order. It's also really good at preventing race conditions and makes your environment highly predictable.

• Ask HN: Why do message queue-based architectures seem less popular now?
  5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 18 Jun 2024

  I never fully understood the need for back end message queues TBH. You can just poll the database or data store every few seconds and process tasks in batches... IMO, the 'real time' aspect was only ever useful for front end use cases for performance reasons since short polling every second with HTTP (with all its headers/overheads) is prohibitively expensive. Also, HTTP long polling introduces some architectural complexity which is not worth it (e.g. sticky sessions are required when you have multiple app servers).

  Unfortunately, real-time messaging complexity entirely to the back end has been the norm for a very long time. My experience is that, in general, it makes the architecture way more difficult to manage. I've been promoting end-to-end pub/sub as an alternative for over a decade (see https://socketcluster.io/) but it mostly fell on deaf ears. Most devs just don't realize how much complexity is added by micromanaging pub/sub channels on the back end and figuring out which message belongs to what user instead of letting end-users decide what channels to subscribe to directly.

  I think part of the problem was the separation between front end and back end developer responsibilities. Back end developers like to ignore the front end as much as possible; when it comes to architecture, their thinking rarely extends beyond the API endpoint; gains which can be made from better integrating the back end with the front end is 'not their job'. From the perspective of front-end developers, they see anything performance-related as 'not their job' either... There aren't enough full stack developers with the required insights to push for integration efficiency/simplicity.

• The Sound of Software
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 27 Apr 2024

  Recently, I added an AI-generated soundtrack to my open source project's home page https://socketcluster.io/

  It seems unconventional at first but I distinctly remember about a decade ago when Adobe Flash was still broadly supported, many Flash websites had soundtracks. I think the reason why regular HTML websites didn't have them was because it was difficult to implement and internet was much slower so they had to be streamed in a special way.

• Is it a good practice to store web sockets connections on redis?
  1 project | /r/node | 24 Jun 2023

  If redis doesn't satisfy your requirements or you're unable to make it work using adaptor, SocketCluster is a great package for this https://socketcluster.io/

• Why messaging is much better than REST for inter-microservice communications
  9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 12 Feb 2023

  Interesting how this feature set is pretty much exactly the same as offered by SocketCluster https://socketcluster.io/

• On the Unhappiness of Software Developers
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 3 Sep 2022

  This resonates with me 100%. Every bit of unhappiness I've felt in my career so far has been caused by a bad manager. The main issue for me has been the final point you mentioned about "Imposed artificial limitations" - I cannot tell you the number of times that I've been forced to use an inefficient tool or do something in a sub-optimal or downright incorrect way (knowing that it would have to be re-written later) by a bad manager... In some companies, it was a daily occurrence; that's why I never stayed at a single company for longer than 2 years. It's almost impossible to find a company that lets me implement things correctly.

  Thankfully, nobody could constrain me in my open source work. I (with the help of community members) built:

  - SocketCluster (https://socketcluster.io/): A distributed pub/sub framework.

  - Capitalisk (https://capitalisk.com/): A lightweight quantum-resistant blockchain which is less than 5K lines of code.

  - LDEX (https://ldex.trading/): A deterministic decentralized exchange (DEX) which can work with many different blockchain protocols. It's less than 4K lines of code in total and only has 3 small third-party dependencies (including sub-dependencies).

• Looking for real-time message solution recommendations
  2 projects | /r/softwarearchitecture | 5 Jun 2022

  The two best lightweight solutions I have worked with are SocketCluster and NATS. SocketCluster is used to build out a custom backend that scales very well. NATS would be used as a central pub/sub system. If you need queueing, you'll need to add additional services like Redis.

• How to define RPC server with SocketCluster.
  1 project | /r/node | 28 Mar 2022

  In the homepage for SocketCluster it is mentioned that it is a Highly scalable pub/sub and RPC framework optimized for async/await. However in the documentation I have not found anything related to RPC. Am I interpreting anything wrong here?

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