Is Socket IO slower than Netty? (MMO)

Networking & Multiplayer
#1

I’m writing a game that will support multiplayer using LibGDX. HTML is a priority, so I’m forced into using WebSockets (Socket.io library).

My question is, will using Socket.io be a performance problem compared to a framework like Netty?

#2

Socket I/O will be the least of your concerns when building a MMO. By the time you have thousands of concurrent tcp-connections, it may play a role.

#3

What are some of the bigger problems that will be faced? :confused:

I ended up going with a websocket library, as Socket IO didn’t support GWT.

#4

[quote]What are some of the bigger problems that will be faced? :confused:
[/quote]
Well :slight_smile: Getting to the point where you have a published game, with a thousand concurrent players.

#5

You don’t have to use WebSockets, you can use “Transfer-Encoding: chunked” instead.

It’s better because it’s readable (debuggable) and does not use CPU for parsing WebSocket protocol stuff.

#6

Sockets are definitely the way to go if you want low latency and throughput. WebSockets are just Sockets with a HTTP Handshake.

That’s not to say that you have to use Sockets. Plenty of things you can achieve with other methods like long-polling etc.

#7

Long-polling is not usable for games, because each message from the server kicks in a new request from the client. It just wont scale. But HTTP streaming does scale: http://fuse.rupy.se/about.html

The only thing WebSockets are good at is bandwidth, which is not a problem if you use a event based protocol instead of tick based.