using BOSH/similar technique for existing application/system

Question

We've an existing system which connects to the the back end via http (apache/ssl) and polls the server for new messages, needless to say we have scalability issues.

I'm researching on removing this polling and have come across BOSH/XMPP but I'm not sure how we should take the BOSH technique (using long lived http connection).

I've seen there are few libraries available but the entire thing seems bloaty since we do not need buddy lists etc and simply want to notify the clients of available messages.

The client is written in C/C++ and works across most OS so that is an important factor. The server is in Java.

does bosh result in huge number of httpd processes? since it has to keep all the clients connected, what would be the limit on that. we are also planning to move to 64 bit JVM/apache what would be the max limit of clients in that case.

any hints?

Answer 1

I would note that BOSH is separate from XMPP, so there's no "buddy lists" involved. XMPP-over-BOSH is what you're thinking of there.

Take a look at collecta.com and associated blog posts (probably by Jack Moffitt) about how they use BOSH (and also XMPP) to deliver real-time information to large numbers of users.

As for the scaling issues with Apache, I don't know — presumably each connection is using few resources, so you can increase the number of connections per Apache process. But you could also check out some of the connection manager technologies (like punjab) mentioned on the BOSH page above.