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I am making a live app with the use of websockets (express-ws npm package) in node.js. The users send a message via ws every 10 seconds. Each of such requests takes about 1-1.5 milliseconds to handle (I have made some .time benchmarks). Everything works perfectly while there are less than ~9000 connections. However, if it grows above that, those 9000 requests every 10 seconds take 9000*1.5=13500ms > 10s and some users do not get their requests handled (as node.js is single-threaded). This is my first live app that gets so many online users at the same time so I do not know what to do. How to handle that many connections correctly?

I have read some articles about that and I have found some solutions which do not seem to work for me (at least I do not understand how to make them working).

  1. Use the cluster module. The problem is that the requests have to share variables. I have an array of data which is updated or read during every request and clusters, as I have read and tested, are basically another processes which cannot share memory.
  2. The same applies to worker_threads. They can kinda share memory, but I have to set up the communication between all threads and it still comes up to handling 9000 connections in 10 seconds which are not significantly faster than 9000 connections that have been in the beginning (that 9000 requests are simply a database search and an update with a few validations whether a user is registered and has provided valid data). Probably, if I throw the validation to a worker thread, the connections limit will grow up to 13000, but it is still insufficient.
  3. I thought of creating a separate server on an another port (probably even in c++) and send all the requests that have passed the validation there (websocket between the servers). That seems like the best solution as for now but it still comes up to handling 9000 requests in one thread which will not make it much better.

So, how do I handle that many requests that need to share a variable efficiently? How do game servers which need to update the states of thousands of players multiple times per second do that?

Dominik
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Fortnite
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  • Why do you need to validate user registration on every command? If you're maintaining persistent connections, it should be enough to validate the client at the start. Apart from that, there is not much that can be done to speed up operations on shared state. Big applications are fast because they unshare state using techniques such as sharding, or replicate data for reading using caching. Besides, not many game servers out there handle thousands of players. – Robert Kawecki May 05 '21 at 13:52

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