As a tip to anyone using nginx to proxy websockets: make sure you increase the proxy read timeout for that connection. Otherwise, nginx will drop the (active) connection much sooner than you'd otherwise expect.
I ended up going with
proxy_read_timeout 31536000;
The more cautious solution might be to use a lower timeout (120s or so) but to have the server send heartbeats over the websocket when it's not doing anything. (If you're using socket.io, you're already getting this behavior for free; if you're using sock.js, you can enable it.) This breaks down at true scale, though: when you have 100000 idle clients you might want to announce to at any time, but don't usually have anything to say to most of them, sending heartbeats to every client in that pool can saturate your link.
A compromise is probably to set the long timeout, but then use a cluster-monitoring service which will push a new config to your load-balancers in response to observed network-toplogy changes.
Scaling the heartbeat is actually not a big issue. If you're actively using the socket for things, the overhead of that is likely much higher than supporting pings. You'll actually hit port limitations first (if you can support ~65k connected clients per machine), in our experience. 3000 pings a second isn't too bad (that's 100k clients, pinging every 30 seconds or so). You can also change how fast the client is pinging based on client activity.
This isn't actually a limit, by the way. The port limitation is a uniqueness constraint on full (source IP, source port, dest IP, dest port) tuples; it just means one client can't have more than 65k connections open to your server (which tends to trip people up, because they see themselves running into the limit when benchmarking parallelism--because they're sending all the requests from their own computer.)
What you'll usually hit first is the open file descriptor ulimit.
edit: I thought too fast. Amfy's reply to you is correct (and what I have seen previously). When proxying with nginx, you use up the ports locally (unless I'm missing something?).
Again, you're not "using up" local ports, just (IP/port, IP/port) pairs--so increasing the number of remote ports you want to talk to allows you to make more connections just as well as if you could increase the number of local ports used to talk to them.
(This might not be so simple for some servers which expect to only listen on one port; the workaround is to use multiple IPs for the backend server, and make sure the backend process is listening on 0.0.0.0. They don't have to be real IPs--you can just as well do port-forwarding on the backend box from one-IP:lots-of-ports to lots-of-virtual-IPs:one-port. It's simple enough to listen on multiple ports in both Node and Erlang, though, so this probably doesn't matter for most people writing websocket servers.)
An active websocket connection does have a faster response time than a regular HTTP connection ([1]). The difference here isn't a ton, but may affect real-time applications. The packets are also smaller, so less overhead if you're sending many.
The biggest difference I saw is that when the client or server needs to send several quick requests (many within a couple second), long polling breaks down. From the spec ([2]), "Once the server sends a long poll response, typically the client immediately sends a new long poll request." This delay can add up, and is not pure full duplex. Chunked responses help for server -> client, but client -> server still has the same issues.
[1] http://eng.42go.com/secure-websockets-vs-https-benchmark/
[2] http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-loreto-http-bidirectional-0...
thank you
EDIT: it's the proxy_send_timeout directive.
proxy_read_timeout times out reads from the upstream. It will trigger when a backend server goes AWOL, not when a client falls off the net.
If you want to detect client-side disconnection, you want proxy_send_timeout.
You can emulate this by having server sent heartbeats with a proxy_read_timeout with the client required to respond to them before the server will send any more, thus going read-silent whenever the client fails to respond, but why not just have the client do the pinging? Then the server doesn't have to say anything in response most of the time.
That's exactly what i meant. Sorry if it was unclear. I accidentally switched proxy_send_timeout and proxy_read_timeout.
If you do want timeouts like this, an alternative is to handle this on the application layer, and not rely on nginx to drop connections.