This is an example (incomplete) of a PubSub implementation for a chat service using Redis and proxying client connections. With 3 c4.8xlarge instances and single c4.4xlarge instance for redis, tests using a similar implementation reached over 100k connected clients at 10k messages/sec with all clients subscribing to a single channel.
This is not a ready-to-go npm installable package; this is just an example of a potential architecture implementation using Redis PubSub and locally proxying connections to reduce Redis load.
This is achieved by having each instance proxy subscriptions to a single (or small number) of redis connections, so that while each instance may have hundreds or thousands of subscribers, a single subscriber to redis is shared amongst them. This allows us to scale out subscribers while adding only a fraction of actual redis subscribers and significantly reduces network traffic.
- Use Redis PubSub
- Have a small number of shared connections, which cuts down on the # of redis subscribers
- When a message is received for a subscribed channel, emit an event to all locally subscribed clients
For example, if 100 clients were subscribed to "room1", and each client had its own connection to Redis, a single published message would result in 100 messages being delivered. This can be optimized by having a single connection subscribe to "room1", and locally emitting an event to all 100 clients that a message was received. It cuts down on network and redis traffic, with the tradeoff of increased node CPU usage (these messages have to be routed somewhere).
The main bottleneck here is the number of event emitter listeners and how many messages are being published per second. Tweaking will need to happen on a per use case basic, but in local benchmarks a single node is able to many 10s - 100k clients on a singe process and a reasonable msg/s rate (~5k). This can be tweaked and tradeoffs made to improve performance (e.g., fall back to polling for chat messages if the publisher rate for a room is too high)
See test/pubsub__client.js
(a mocha test file) for an example of how to use it
The basic idea is to create a redis connection instance object (configuring shard
settings and other configuration options), and create PubClient client object
(from lib/pubsub__client.js). Each client object has a .subscribe
and .publish
method, which