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Comment by bjclark | Hacker News Reader

This guy obviously hasn't actually used xmpp in real life. eJabberd does really weird things to us when we throw 300-400k messages at it a day.

And this: "XMPP servers, which are essentially make or break an XMPP application, are rapidly maturing beyond instant messaging."

Have he ever tried to actually debug ejabberd? Cause it's very painful and time consuming.

Now, I'm not bashing xmpp, it's pretty cool, but it's not exactly "the next big thing", IMO.

We're actually abandoning it for AMPQ.

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I'd bet that early web servers, too, did some really weird things when web adoption started to snowball in the 90's. A protocol/paradigm's current state of implementation is not necessarily indicative of future progress and adoption. If anything, the fact that developers like you are building large-scale applications and discovering what breaks it is encouraging for XMPP's future.

XMPP is TEN years old! You'd sort of expect the software to be reasonably mature by now.

"eJabberd does really weird things to us".

Describe the weird things, please. I'm about to deploy ejabberd for a production site, and I'm interested in your experience.

Huge processor spikes which we think are caused by too many connections to a single room or user. We're not 100% sure because we can't replicate it in a dev environment and we don't really want to turn on debugging in a production environment, not to mention that debugging mode isn't the most helpful thing ever.

If you start it up in "live" mode (ejabberdclt live), we see "Replacing connection..." sometimes, which then throws a "Broken Pipe" error in our rails app. But again, we can't isolate what's happening there.

XMPP is XML based and need heavy processing power (for e.g. not suitable for mobile platform) whereas AMPQ is a binary protocol.

http://www.deepdarc.com/2008/02/14/mobile-xmpp/

Keep in mind that the problems we're having aren't with XMPP, per se, just with ejabberd. Ejabberd worked flawlessly for several months until it started exhibiting some very strange behavior and performance characteristics. We upgraded to a newer version and we suddenly ran into another, different set of strange behaviors.

That said, word on the street is that ejabberd is the best implementation of an XMPP server. AMQP supposedly offers better reliability (with RabbitMQ) as well as a whole lot of pretty cool features that Jabber really doesn't.

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