You can't use Faye without eventmachine. Cable only uses faye-websocket though - https://github.com/faye/faye-websocket-ruby . Do let me know if you had any negative experiences with that. I don't know about the state of the things in the 1.9.3 days, but faye-websocket has always "just worked" for me.
Re:Existential crisis at Railsconf
by bradgessler on Wednesday April 22, 2015 @12:20PM
(#9421494)
I wrote http://firehose.io/ that runs on a separate fleet of servers to handle pub/sub that uses Faye. For the most part it runs without putting up a fuss.
Lost messages aren't a concern because it's assumed the protocol won't handle lost or dropped messages, so Firehose messages have a sequence that counts up per channel that the client keeps track of.
My memory of them is rather horrible.
Memory leaks, segmentation faults(!) and obscure deadlocks eventually made me scratch EventMachine from the list of things I'd ever want to touch again.
And Faye, well, I don't think I even got it fully running at the time. I still re-call my astonishment when I realized that neither of their two different server-impls at the time would pass even most basic tests (e.g. browser connect/disconnect, redis start/stop) without crashing, locking up or losing messages.
Admittedly it's been a while... Is anyone running Faye in production and can comment?
Edit: Thanks for the feedback. I guess it's time to give Faye a second chance.