THE HIDDEN COMPLEXITY OF SCALING WEBSOCKETS

Summary from the TLDR Web Dev newsletter

Scaling WebSockets for real-time apps presents unexpected complexities, especially regarding graceful deployments and maintaining persistent connections. Ways to address some of the issues with WebSockets include having a deployment strategy that minimizes downtime by using phased server removal and client-side reconnection logic with exponential backoff. Heartbeat mechanisms can also be used to detect silent disconnects. Finally, a server-sent events (SSE) fallback guarantees reliable communication even on restrictive networks.