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Comment by amix | Hacker News Reader

At Plurk.com we use node.js to provide comet updates to over 300.000 active clients at _once_. It's not a toy and it scales much better than most of other web-stacks I have tried. Read more here: http://amix.dk/blog/post/19490#Plurk-Instant-conversations-u...

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Comparing comet performance between node and ringo should be interesting. Ringo uses jetty/cometd, so it should scale pretty decently as well. My guess is that node will use less memory per connection (and thus allow more simultanous connections), while ringo/jetty should have better latency. This is also what this benchmark suggests: http://praxx.is/post/486034949/comet-with-bayeux-node-js-vs-...

Before our node.js solution we actually ran Java along with a highly optimized JBoss Netty comet implementation and it had a hard time scaling since it used _a lot_ of memory. Generally, our Java solution used around 10 times more memory than our node.js solution. Like I note in that post:

"We have rewritten to node.js from Java+JBoss Netty, because the old solution had scalability problems. We have also been able to build a very sophisticated messaging system given JavaScript expressiveness and the simplicity of node.js. Generally, we have found node.js and V8 very impressive - and it uses about 10 times less memory than Java+Netty did."

Jetty Comet uses a lot more memory than a vanilla JBoss Netty implementation - at least based on my benchmarks.

I know, i read that post. I'm planning to do a Node/Ringo comet comparison soon, and memory usage/max connections will be a part of that.

Please do. I don't know why people keep reposting my benchmark, its terrible and really only applied to what I'm doing with Comet. Memory, etc, isn't the biggest factor for us.

comet updates are a niche application

inflammatory posts with little to no statistical backing are a niche application.

That said, if you were to flip the post to be "hey node.js is cool, but check out RingoJS while you are already hot for SSJS" Now that would be awesome!

just ignore the nodejs part, then you don't have to like the whole article...

(btw, nodejs and ringojs are on the same side: SSJS)

thanks for the clarification. I was unaware.

The mainstream is composed of a million niches.

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