War Story: We Migrated from Socket.io 4.7 to Ably 2.0 and Cut Chat Latency 40% for Global Users
A Series C messaging startup migrated from Socket.io 4.7 to Ably 2.0 to address high chat latency and message delivery failures, particularly for users in Southeast Asia and South America. The switch reduced global p99 latency by 40%, cut infrastructure costs by 22%, and eliminated nearly all reconnection issues. The migration was completed in six weeks, with no need to manage backend servers post-migration. Ably's edge-optimized network enabled faster message delivery and instant regional scalability.
- ▪Global p99 chat latency decreased from 1.8 seconds to 1.08 seconds after migrating to Ably 2.0.
- ▪Mobile reconnection error rates dropped from 8.2% to 0.07% with Ably’s edge-optimized WebSocket fallback.
- ▪Realtime infrastructure costs were reduced by $3.8k per month, from $17.2k to $13.4k, after eliminating self-managed Redis and Socket.io nodes.
- ▪Message delivery success improved from 94.3% to 99.97% post-migration.
- ▪Adding new geographic regions went from a 14-day provisioning process to zero days with Ably’s 200+ PoPs.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
try { if(localStorage) { let currentUser = localStorage.getItem('current_user'); if (currentUser) { currentUser = JSON.parse(currentUser); if (currentUser.id === 3900225) { document.getElementById('article-show-container').classList.add('current-user-is-article-author'); } } } } catch (e) { console.error(e); } ANKUSH CHOUDHARY JOHAL Posted on Apr 29 • Originally published at johal.in War Story: We Migrated from Socket.io 4.7 to Ably 2.0 and Cut Chat Latency 40% for Global Users #story #migrated #socketio #ably In Q3 2024, our team at a Series C messaging startup serving 1.2M monthly active users across 42 countries hit a wall: Socket.io 4.7’s p99 chat latency for users in Southeast Asia and South America had ballooned to 1.8 seconds, with 12% of messages failing to deliver during peak…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at DEV.to (Top).
Discussion
0 commentsMore from DEV.to (Top)
