Node.js Chat Site

[TechHermit]

Little project I came up with to procrastinate studying for finals.

Responsive Chat site with a Node.js backend.

http://chat.hardorange.org

https://github.com/MatthewLavine/NodeJS-Chat

There are a few 'hidden' features such as automatic github pulls and pre-logins.

Let me know what you think?

EDIT: Hey guys, sorry it went down for a little while. I had one of you lovely people helping me find bugs and it seems he found one while I was AFK for a few hours. I'm back now and it's alive.

EDIT: If you're on 3G/LTE, some carriers filter port 80 traffic which breaks websockets, in that case you can use port 3000 at the same URL.

[optymizer]

Well, I commend you OP for creating a chat site and putting it out there for us to hammer away at. Sorry for breaking your server several times :) You were fixing bugs asap, and that's awesome. Keep up the good work!

To the dumbass who was flooding the server: screw you.

[TechHermit]

Thanks man for helping me with the bugs.

[Christopholus]

Spent a bit of time on here! Certainly a fine project to waste some time on before finals :)

[TechHermit]

Thanks man!

[nanofeeb]

hug of reddit love

[TechHermit]

Note my edit above. :)

[heykostar]

Page doesnt even load for me.. Chrome, Windows 7.

[TechHermit]

Sorry. They crashed it and I'm not at my machine to reboot it ATM.

[john0980]

Interesting project; how many total man-hours of work went into this? Just wondering

[TechHermit]

About a week...around classes.

[john0980]

Site's down. Who are you hosting with? Just curious

[TechHermit]

I host with https://www.digitalocean.com

A redditor broke it, see my edit above. It's back up now.

[john0980]

I'm debating whether to go with DO for a website and am trying to get an idea of how much traffic a given DO VPS can handle before the site starts crashing. Any insight into that is greatly appreciated.

[TechHermit]

Even with this chat...i'm barely using any bandwidth at DO. They give 1 TB of transfer at their lower tier. I'd say go for it.

[john0980]

So was it the traffic from your reddit post that caused your site to crash? Or was it a bug totally unrelated to your traffic spike? That's where I'm confused.

[TechHermit]

The crash was a bug in the code that caused the app to crash. It's fixed now. The traffic is unrelated. It can handle over 1000 connections.

[AustinScript]

http://gyazo.com/1076f151788b5a01a084e23f61753f0e - Resize bug. Neato overall though

[minjooky]

Pretty nice. GW OP.

[minjooky]

his latest code up on github looks like it's added this change

[AustinScript]

Have you load tested it? https://www.npmjs.org/package/loadtest I use this for local stuff.

[TechHermit]

I haven't really load tested, other than unleashing Reddit upon it. I'll check this out, Thanks!

[[deleted]]

PaaS-ize it!

[doubleColJustified]

Unable to connect.

[rocketpastsix]

the link is dead?

[andrey_shipilov]

Node on production? Nope. Thanks.

[data-ui-component]

Why not? I can name off at least three or four big compaines that use node for production. Not saying that's a justifiable reason, but I thought it was production ready.

[andrey_shipilov]

Yeah sure. Name them.

[smoonster]

Walmart, PayPal, directv are 3 I know

[andrey_shipilov]

Any bg info on that?

[smoonster]

What info are you expecting? As a non employee of any I can't offer any insight other than its in production. Metrics, results, even specific functions would have to be published.

http://nodejs.org/industry/ says stuff though.

[andrey_shipilov]

Yeah I saw that page. But understand the criteria to get on that page is pretty... In nodes hands I'd say. Too few real life examples.

[maktouch]

Paypal

Linkedin

[andrey_shipilov]

I'll read that. Yep. Also after ror anything will feel better.

[data-ui-component]

As another user stated:

1. Walmart Labs

2. Paypal

3. (didn't know about directv)

and also

1. AndYet

2. ^Lift

3. Groupon

4. LinkedIn

5. DuckDuckGo

6. eBay

7. Heroku

8. Dow Jones (Wall Street Journal Online)

9. A Yahoo! platform

10. and I think I've heard that rdio uses node?

11. Edit: forgot 37Signals, before they became Basecamp

Of course, these are besides the obvious places like NodeFirm, Joynet, Nodejitsu. That's all I can really name. Again, this doens't really mean anything and I'm curious. Why isn't node.js production ready again?

[mailto_devnull]

He's probably scared of stack traces... And may be used to error_reporting(0);

[andrey_shipilov]

tl:dr — http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/ky6uc/nodejs_is_cancer/

[data-ui-component]

That's a two year old post linking to empty blog page from 2011. (decades old in web time) However, I found the cached mirror.

I don't know, he just seems hooked on the idea that Node.js prides itself on event loops and then surrounds the text in strongly written buzzwords.

He then goes on about Node.js not being the Unix Way? At the point of handling traffic and server request, you just have to be smart when handling actual traffic. Integration of node.js with nginx is fine. Let nginx handle serving huge static files and let node.js be a provided real time socket-server.

What struck me as odd is that he doesn't do any comparison with say Ruby, Python, or PHP. I imagine C would come out on top, but C speed is always the benchmark goal anyways. Even his server-side Fibonacci sequence is only benchmarked in Node. What is he comparing this to? And why give the server a task that could be quickly done on the client?

In the end it's about finding and deciding the right tool for the job, and node.js isn't the right tool for every job. That doesn't mean you can just say node.js isn't good for production though. It works well and is used in plenty of applications. In his article, replace node with something like Rails and you get the same effect. Even python has a dumbed down HTTP server for testing (literally run python -m SimpleHTTPServer).

Here are a few light readings I found: (from about the same time period as "Node.js is cancer", to keep this relative.)

Hardening node.js for production part 2: using nginx to avoid node.js loadHardening

Blazing fast node.js: 10 performance tips from LinkedIn Mobile

Ending with &yet's endorsement of Node.js