We recently made the Socket.IO parser 300% faster. The new underlying websocket server is extremely fast (check the benchmarks at https://github.com/learnboost/websocket.io/), and optimizations to long-polling are coming as well.
Is there anything people looking forward to these features should know to plan? Like, I was about to start doing some load balancing stuff soon. Is that a waste of my time and I should just work on the core logic and figure load balancing is just going to be made easier in the near future and I shouldn't waste my time with it? Or should I roll my own option for now and then just figure at some point I should be able to transition to something that performs better in the future?
Socket.io has a lot of bloat that isn't required if all you need is a simple Websocket communications. Please do not add long-polling to websocket.io, it's the wrong place to do that type of abstraction.
Not true. I continue to use https://github.com/Worlize/WebSocket-Node with great success.