I personally don't feel like he was berating GoChat, if anything I was sad for GoChat to have grown and fallen under it's own weight, but yet still enough respect for GoChat to have had the foresight to build and execute. The author even called it a "genius move"
You don't feel that way because he edited his article and in its original form it was VERY uncharitable to GoChat. Now, after the edits, it's only lying by claiming they're similar in performance profile, when in reality, in terms of realtime performance, GoChat is all GoSnap does PLUS a lot more extra work.
And besides (leaving aside the numerous other 'issues' with the claim, as well discussed here) is "My $200/mo stack performs better than a $4000/mo stack" really that much worse than $100?
Plus the condescending tone when he is just copy pasting code from other project is really annoying to read. Apart from this the content is interesting though.
This is exactly the word I was racking my brain for! I love reading about how to make something more scalable by there was so much filth I had to wade through to get to that in this article...
A lot of condescension for 3 small points.
Now I would use pusher but that's extremely expensive but scalable.
Years ago, you had to suffer using poll(), select(), whilst dealing with threads or forking. It's so easy these days. A raspberry pi should be able to support 1,000 clients with any of the above recommended languages.
The original article is condescending to say the least, that doesn't mean that $4k of ongoing hosting costs shouldn't be able to handle a few million simultaneous users... though, something tells me that Pokemon Go could approach twitter or FB overhead, and related apps like chat could see huge swarms as a side effect.
That kind of problem would kill most first generation apps, as those who've seen twitter grow can attest to. I don't think there are any IRC networks that big at this point.
If you have problems with this, there's something really wrong with either your design or your choice of tools.
How'd you go about building this?
I really don't approve at all of the GoChat shaming going on. The author may be 100% correct that GoChat made mistakes in writing code that doesn't scale well but that doesn't give him a blank check to beat and berate GoChat. It reads as a very discouraging post to newer/less experienced programmers in my opinion, essentially "Don't even bother making something unless you know it can scale to millions of users" which I think is a terrible message to be sending.