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socketio
socket.io
TypeScript2011–2024
socketio / socket.io

socket.io

Bidirectional and low-latency communication for every platform

Web DevelopmentNetworking
Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
26Distinct people
27Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
63.2KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Bidirectional and low-latency communication for every platform

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 6:01:08 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 year27 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2011-10-13 19:01:41 UTC to 2024-06-20 18:05:47 UTC.

024682011-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 1 submissions, 0 comments20112012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 8 mentions; 0 submissions, 8 comments2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 1 submissions, 2 comments2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 0 submissions, 4 comments2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 1 submissions, 2 comments2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 1 submissions, 0 comments20172018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 1 submissions, 0 comments2024

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20112011-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC110
20122012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC808
20132013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC312
20142014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC404
20152015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC312
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC110
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC110

What Hacker News says

8 sources
biscarch·Oct 26, 2012
Was going to mention this as well. socket.io falls back to long polling, so you have to be careful when trying to produce benchmarks based only on websockets. I didn't see this in the server code so I assume the default transports were used. io.configure(ENV, function(){ io.set('transports', ['websocket']); }); more here: https://github.com/LearnBoost/Socket.IO/wiki/Configuring-Soc... Also, Firefox version would be nice to know.
In A Node.js speed dilemma: AJAX or Socket.IO?
cgbystrom·Jul 30, 2012
I would strongly advise not to base your push mechanism solely on Web Sockets. Despite advances modern browsers are making with Web Sockets support, the current compatibility is not there yet. For starters, IE has no support, though that is starting to change with IE10. But the biggest issue is with personal firewalls / corporate proxies. These are unfortunately quite horrible at handling Web Sockets. Many popular firewalls such as avast! and Bitdefender can’t handle the WS protocol and completely blocks traffic despite browser support and it being valid HTTP. The socket.io guys did some extensive research on what firewalls are causing these issues. I don’t think their list is exhaustive but it features most major personal firewalls out there. Have a look at https://github.com/LearnBoost/socket.io/wiki/Socket.IO-and-f... , it's no reading
Read the rest
of joy. I’ve deployed quite large installations of Beaconpush (a push server incidentally based on Netty as well). First going from Web Sockets with fallback, over to pure WS and we’re looking at going back to using fallbacks once again due to these incompatibility issues. This time we are looking at using SockJS instead of rolling our own (to be fair, there were no open-source libs doing this when we started). I’ve ported SockJS to Netty (https://github.com/cgbystrom/sockjs-netty) and it’s working although I wouldn’t say it is production ready. I urge you to have a look at SockJS and socket.io. Personally I prefer SockJS since it aims at emulating the Web Socket interface and nothing more as compared to socket.io (which adds a pub/sub layer). Also, it does not rely on a Flash fallback (which is another story). The socket.io guys are however working on engine.io, which will split the transport fallback mechanisms of socket.io to a separate library. That's a good idea, but it still uses Flash and IMHO a more complex "transport upgrade".
In Integrating WebSockets in Netty
mixu·Jan 19, 2012
A pure-Node approach is a lot simpler: you can just use Node's HTTPS (if you don't care about load balancing) and attach Socket.io to it. Just don't put your Socket.io server behind Nginx if you want WebSockets support. With load balancing, I would recommend going with Stud/Stunnel and HAProxy. Terminating SSL with a specialized piece of software is nicer (separate SSL overhead to another box), and using a separate load balancer allows for more flexible options, e.g. serving static assets from Nginx. There is nothing wrong with node-http-proxy, it's just that these two projects have been around for longer and are better understood from an ops perspective. You cannot use round robin load balancing, you need to have at least IP-based stickiness with Socket.io for now. Well, you can round robin if you use the Redis store but you'll run into
Read the rest
inefficiencies with https://github.com/LearnBoost/socket.io/issues/686 . I'll do a bit more coverage on other SIO deployment-related issues once I get the chapter on Socket.io finished for my (free) book in a few weeks. If I were starting now, I'd just ignore the Flash sockets transport since it makes the whole stack more complex due to not looking like HTTP to load balancers, and start with Engine.io / WebSocket.io to take advantage of their simplicity.
In The Trello Tech Stack

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