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Comment by AhtiK | Hacker News Reader

Are most of the Socket.IO users using node at the server side?

I started using Socket.IO with python server, gevent-socketio (actually Flask-SocketIO that is based on gevent-socketio). But then the Socket.IO 1.0 came out 28 May 2014 and gevent-socketio is not yet updated. Not sure if there's any plan for it.

Another tricky part is that gevent-socketio doesn't play together with uwsgi so I had to move from uwsgi to gunicorn in order to use Socket.IO and also the latest gunicorn breaks Socket.IO support so must use gunicorn 0.16.1 instead of 0.19.1. A bit frustrating ride. But that's another story :-)

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I was planning to use socket.io with the same stack (Python, Flask) for a game development project last year. Figured that the Python ports of socket.io weren't well-maintained so I took the traditional approach with Comet(Long-polling). On another note, if you're interested in Socket.IO because of WebSockets then do know that Android 4.3 and older don't support WebSockets and so the server might need to support Long-polling anyway. It might actually introduce more lag to first check for websockets, and if unavailable, fall back to long-polling. I will wait till majority of target devices support it by default.

I was playing with gevent-socketio, and ended up with massive memory leaks - could be it was my mistakes in code though.

But later I went with gevent + gevent-websocket (gevent-socketio also uses it), and it's been working like a charm for me.

> It might actually introduce more lag to first check for websockets, and if unavailable, fall back to long-polling.

Socket.IO works the other way around since v 1.0, thanks to Engine.IO. It starts with long polling and tries to upgrade to WebSocket or Flash sockets if possible.

That's good to know. And Socket.IO could move back to WebSocket-first approach, once the technology becomes more pervasive. It's still a task to set up Socket.IO with Python though. Don't know how nice it plays with Node.js, but I'm happy moving to Go instead.

Android 4.3 and older don't support WebSockets

In native developmet, I presume? Because the Chrome browser can handle them fine.

Yes, native. Android's webview was based on the old Android Browser until KitKat/4.4 when it switched to using Chrome to render.

Check out SockJS which has a properly tested/supported Python server https://github.com/mrjoes/sockjs-tornado

At one point I'm probably moving to vert.x to use SockJS server-side [1], I'm not that tied to python and would be good to decouple the whole messaging into a separate process anyway.

[1] http://vertx.io/core_manual_java.html#sockjs

http://aaugustin.github.io/websockets/ might be attractive if you're on Python 3.

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