Socket.io's most discerning feature was fallback to polling. There's also some useful abstractions there, like reconnecting, rooms, as well as some useful ecosystem around it, like socket.io-redis adapter which enables you transparently scale horizontally. If your time is at premium, you might find socket.io work for you, but it's not really hard to write everything better yourself, and better tuned to your use-case.
> AFAIK, socket.io is a wrapper around websockets. This makes it unsuitable for some fast paced games with alot of players.
For fast-action multiplayer, there's currently no sensible offering besides WebRTC's DataChannel, with all it brings on board (I've yet to study it in-depth). I'm having high hopes for QUIC to gain more ground.
> And what can you do about tcp attack vectors? Are lamers trying to take down servers a real threat?
From what I've experienced first hand, bots/scripts are most frequent enjoyment-spoiler for other players. I've never ran at scale where I'd be interesting target for actual attacks.
This needs more investigations imho, I wonder where this fails so badly; is WebRTC aiming at ~100ms latency?
This is a tcpdump after loading the page:
\time sudo tcpdump -c 1000 -ni eth0 udp and port 9777
1000 packets captured
1000 packets received by filter
0 packets dropped by kernel
0.02user 0.05system 0:12.45elapsed 0%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 5472maxresident)k
0inputs+8outputs (0major+1508minor)pagefaults 0swaps
\time sudo ping -f -c 1000 188.166.46.128
PING 188.166.46.128 (188.166.46.128) 56(84) bytes of data.
....
--- 188.166.46.128 ping statistics ---
1000 packets transmitted, 996 received, 0% packet loss, time 14195ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 28.839/38.641/50.433/5.152 ms, pipe 5, ipg/ewma 14.209/41.787 ms
0.02user 0.13system 0:14.31elapsed 1%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 2248maxresident)k
0inputs+8outputs (0major+1183minor)pagefaults 0swapsthis is after start up.
AFAIK, socket.io is a wrapper around websockets. This makes it unsuitable for some fast paced games with alot of players. Is there a library which abstracts away tcp and udp connections?
And what can you do about tcp attack vectors? Are lamers trying to take down servers a real threat? How do you prepare for this? I therefore advise against writing your own network stack if you intend to make the service available to the public. Or am I too cautious?