Software, precisely built.
Multi-server Chat System Built for Dashboard Hosting
When the database becomes a bottleneck, just remove the database!
John at Dashboard Hosting reached out to us about a chat system they'd built which had reached a wall. It was a Node-based instant messaging feature which had worked pretty well at first. But the number of users grew, and then it didn’t.
Even though they had a number of load-balanced server instances running, they found that the Redis database they were using to track connected users was a big bottleneck. No matter how many instances they ran, they all had to talk to that database.
We got them up and running with a database-free implementation of their chat server and received permission to open-source and write about it. There are links to the source code and deep dive article at the end, but here are the main interactions that make it possible.
- Read the Deep Dive Article
- Fork the Client/Server Repo on Github.
- Fork the React Client Repo on Github.