BIbinwiederhier·Sep 26, 2021Submission
Handling 1M WebSockets connections in Go (2019)
3 points · Open discussioneranyanay
1m-go-websockets
Go2019–2021
eranyanay / 1m-go-websockets
1m-go-websockets
handling 1M websockets connections in Go
6Distinct people
6Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
6KGitHub stars
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handling 1M websockets connections in Go
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by month6 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2019-02-13 20:31:15 UTC to 2021-09-26 16:32:30 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Feb 2019 | 2019-02-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-03-01 00:00:00 UTC | 4 | 1 | 3 |
| Mar 2019 | 2019-03-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-04-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Apr 2019 | 2019-04-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-05-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| May 2019 | 2019-05-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-06-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Jun 2019 | 2019-06-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-07-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Jul 2019 | 2019-07-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-08-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Aug 2019 | 2019-08-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-09-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Sep 2019 | 2019-09-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-10-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Oct 2019 | 2019-10-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-11-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Nov 2019 | 2019-11-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-12-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Dec 2019 | 2019-12-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Jan 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-02-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Feb 2020 | 2020-02-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-03-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Mar 2020 | 2020-03-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-04-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Apr 2020 | 2020-04-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-05-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| May 2020 | 2020-05-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-06-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| Jun 2020 | 2020-06-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-07-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Jul 2020 | 2020-07-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-08-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Aug 2020 | 2020-08-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-09-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Sep 2020 | 2020-09-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-10-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Oct 2020 | 2020-10-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-11-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Nov 2020 | 2020-11-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-12-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Dec 2020 | 2020-12-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Jan 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-02-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Feb 2021 | 2021-02-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-03-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Mar 2021 | 2021-03-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-04-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Apr 2021 | 2021-04-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-05-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| May 2021 | 2021-05-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-06-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Jun 2021 | 2021-06-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-07-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Jul 2021 | 2021-07-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-08-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Aug 2021 | 2021-08-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-09-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Sep 2021 | 2021-09-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-10-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
What Hacker News says
6 sources> -- Operational complexity vs. Go.
The JVM is superior for operations, observability, and monitoring to anything that golang has to offer.
>> Disagree on operations part. Take a bare machine and with various configurations (some you don't control) and be ready to drop and run. Nothing beats Go. You cannot be simpler than copy a binary. Yes, the JVM has all sorts of observability. And also a load of tuning that often needs to occur. Go just runs and generally has outstanding performance.
> -- Deeply-nested code directories.
I've seen the same in golang code due to its packaging.
>> Go code is generally not as deeply nested. Often you have <project>/<package>/<file.go>. Not stuff like:
tomcat/java/org/apache/tomcat/websocket/server/xxxx.java
> -- Std lib not matched to work I use Go for.
let's see what golang has to offer anything remotely
Read the rest
similar to java.util.concurrent.*
>> Friend, I'm talking about all the packages here:
https://golang.org/pkg/
> -- Memory consumption.
Depends on how you set up your JVM (Xmx, GC settings, etc.). Java is getting value types soon to address this even more.
>> Yes, mu point (Xmx, GC settings, future things). Many dials == complexity.
> -- Concurrency model, as compared to Go.
Java is getting green threads (see project Loom), and they'll be superior to what golang offers.
>> More Java getting/future vs. Go has today. "they'll be superior to what golang offers." Since we are predicting the future, can I also get next week's S&P500 level for my trades?
>> Let me know when you can remotely close to writing <200 LOC that can handle 1m websocket connections from a laptop. There are 2 source files here.
https://github.com/eranyanay/1m-go-websockets/tree/master/4_...
Again as I opened with, these are my experiences. If Java and the future versions of Java and the tolling, IDEs, CI/CD tools, inspectors, etc, work for you. Great. Have at it.
I will keep deploying rock solid Go applications with minimal complexity and maximal performance/reliability, out of the box. I shall enjoy flatter code trees, working without a IDE when necessary (totally possible), enjoying simple make files for builds, and solving a ton real world problems with minimal external libraries (again, dependencies ~= complexity ~= risk).
Checkout some great stats from the 2019 Go Survey here: https://blog.golang.org/survey2019-results
I will depart with a final thought about Go: Why are increasingly more and more web-scale infrastructure projects being written in Go? (CockroachDB, Openshift, NATS, Docker, Istio, Etcd, Docker, K8S, large parts of AWS, Azure, and CGP).
Very few Go libraries start goroutines on their own. Concurrency is mostly an application level concern.
HTTP library is unusual in that sense.
At the same time, the beauty of how http library is designed and the solution he describes is that there are hooks that allow being even more efficient with very little code.
Or to put it differently: Go gives you excellent (compared to everything else out there except C++/Rust) networking performance out of the box and you can go even faster with a minimal amount of effort.
What you call "dropping to this level" is 80 lines of code (https://github.com/eranyanay/1m-go-websockets/blob/master/3_...) and now you don't even have to write them yourself.
In Handling 1M websocket connections in Go> Noticed they had to down to epoll: https://github.com/eranyanay/1m-go-websockets/blob/master/3_.... that seems a bit too low level.
Agreed, I'd be quite curious how many libraries in the Go ecosystem they can't use as a result. Either because the library spawns a goroutine, uses one under the hood, etc.
Having to drop to this level makes me wonder if it'd be better to just use a language better suited to this type of asynchronous networking (C/C++/Rust).
In Handling 1M websocket connections in GoVery cool. Noticed they had to go down to epoll: https://github.com/eranyanay/1m-go-websockets/blob/master/3_... that seems a bit too low level. Why not spawn 1m goroutines is that not feasible?
This also reminds me of Erlang VM handling 2M for Whatsapp on a single server in 2012:
https://blog.whatsapp.com/196/1-million-is-so-2011
In Handling 1M websocket connections in GoHandling 1M websocket connections in Go
207 points · Open discussion