Meteor: Heroku vs. Node-Jitsu

[Phil Cockfield]

When I was playing around with Derby, there were special config mods you had to make to the Socket.io configuration when deploying to Heroku - namely:

  store.io.set 'transports', ['xhr-polling']

  store.io.set 'polling duration', 10

This is to do with the way Heroku works, which shuts down the socket connections after a time, and this configuration keeps them open.

I'm wondering, with Meteor, there are a couple of build-packs I've seen for deploying to Heroku (here and the meteorite one here), which suggests that Heroku is a popular place to deploy meteor (when not deploying the Meteor's own test servers).

Are there any equivalent moves I have to make in configuring Meteor for Heroku to make sure the clients remain connected - or does it "just work". (also, does Meteor use socket.io internally, or has it written it's own version of this?).

Alternatively, one of Node-Jitsu's advertised benefits is that it's optimised for these kinds of long running socket-connected apps.  But I haven't seen nearly as much discussion or tutorials for deploying meteor over to Node-Jitsu, so I'm wondering what the smart folks who understand the ins-and-outs of the socket system thinking when evaluating a PaaS platform for meteor apps?

Thanks!

[Joc O'Connor]

Hi Phil,

I have been deploying to Heroku for a month or two with the oortcloud meteorite buildpack.

The only issues I had were that you have to set the ROOT_URL environment variable with the Heroku tools

and make sure your Heroku account was verified to accept the mongo add-on.

Everything after that "just worked"

HTH, Joc

[Phil Cockfield]

Awesome - that's good to know, thanks Joc.  Yeah - I ran into that ROOT_URL thing yesterday too!

So, just to confirm - you're not noticing anything like the sockets going to sleep, or getting randomly disconnected after timeouts?

[Joc O'Connor]

Phil, I have had a handful of people using the apps fairly thoroughly over that period and we are

starting to send prototype apps to clients. So far, we haven't received any reports of problems

with timeouts.

Saying that, from what I have read here or on IRC, can't remember which, I believe that Meteor isn't

using sockets yet but an emulation via a library call SockJS. Maybe someone from the dev team

can deny or confirm that, but I'm sure there are people who can explain properly.

Joc

[Phil Cockfield]

Great feedback - thanks.  Good to know you're not feeling any weirdness on Heroku.  Makes life easier.

I just looked up SockJS.  If it's this library, it looks like it does use web-sockets when it can.

Under the hood SockJS tries to use native WebSockets first. If that fails it can use a variety of browser-specific transport protocols and presents them through WebSocket-like abstractions.

Source: https://github.com/sockjs/sockjs-client 

Thanks Joc.

[matt debergalis]

This is true for stock SockJS. But Meteor disables websockets on the
client and only uses the SockJS emulation strategies.

Websockets don't work very well in the field. Reasons include
proxies, no native compression, inconsistent browser support, and
broken mobile networks. There's previous traffic on the list
detailing the problems, and Arnout's deck from last week's Realtime
Conference is worth a read:
https://speakerdeck.com/3rdeden/realtimeconf-dot-oct-dot-2012

cheers,
matt

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[Phil Cockfield]

Woah - interesting to know.  I'm glad you're finding the emulation strategies to be good enough, or better than than the HTML5 bits.

[Joc O'Connor]

To add a further 2 penneth,

years ago I wrote a realtime socket based server in Java for a staff training game written in Flash.

The first client we trialled it with was a high street bank.  There was no way they were going

to open their firewall to let this through. So we very quickly adapted it to use polling instead.

I think Meteor have made a very sensible and pragmatic choice to do the same for the

reasons Matt has mentioned. Socket work nicely in the right controlled environment but

not for general usage.

Joc