Note: This gem is a concept piece originally conceived in 2013 and published as a generic open source project in early 2014.
As of mid-2015, support for performant, native and scalable websockets are available in Rails. See ActiveCable ActionCable, which landed in Rails 5 and will probably be officially released early/mid 2016.
As such, with ActionCable's design, you don't even need a separate pub/sub server (redis) and Node.js running anymore to achieve similar lightweight realtime bi-directional communication with a large number of connected clients to your Rails application.
Progress marches forward! I presume, if you are stuck and can't upgrade to Rails 5 anytime soon, perhaps this project is lightweight compared to some of the heavier alternatives like Faye or PubNub.
Full documentation is available at: