I’ve just released the 0.2 version of faye-websocket for Ruby and Node. This release benefits from the fact that the SockJS project is now using faye-websocket to handle WebSocket connections; my thanks to them for finding the performance bugs and missing features that went into making this release.
The biggest difference in this release is performance. In 0.1, the Node version had a rather interesting performance profile and was pretty slow. We’ve now made a bunch of optimisations that give it a more predictable performance profile across message sizes, and increases performance across the range by orders of magnitude.
The following benchmarks were produced using the ws client to send 1000 messages of various sizes to an echo server:
[caption id=”attachment_1300” align=”aligncenter” width=”500”
caption=”Benchmarks for Node 0.6.6”])
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On Ruby, the change is not so dramatic but for most message sizes performance is improved by at least a factor of 2. This is in part achieved by writing part of the parser in C; this being my first Ruby C extension there may be problems with it so please get on the mailing list if you find any.
[caption id=”attachment_1301” align=”aligncenter” width=”500”
caption=”Benchmarks for Ruby 1.9.3”])
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There is one new feature in the form of Sec-WebSocket-Protocol support. With
the latest WebSocket protocol, the one currently shipping in Chrome and Firefox,
you can specify which application protocol(s) you want to use over the socket,
for example:
// client-side
var ws = new WebSocket('ws://example.com/', ['irc', 'xmpp']);
On the server side, you can specify which protocols the server supports and the first of these that matches a protocol supported by the client will be selected and sent back to the client as part of the handshake.
// server-side
var ws = new WebSocket(request, socket, head, ['bayeux', 'irc']);
ws.protocol // -> 'irc'
I’m really pleased with the progress on this project since decoupling it from Faye, and stoked that SockJS has adopted it. They’ve helped me improve things a great deal just in the last few days and it’s great to know these changes will go into making Faye faster.
