How Pokein Works and how can it Scale

Question

I am searching for a WebSockets solution for my ASP.NET 4.5 website project that I will develop for both web and as mobile application using HTML5 technologies.

I need a solution that will allow me to push messages from the server to the client. I've found several ones including SignalR and Pokein, bot seems to be very good solutions for .NET. Right now I take think that I will try Pokein.

I'm addressing this question to those who have experienced with it, but I'm also open for other alternative solutions.

Here are my questions regarding Pokein (Pokein.com)

1) Can Poekin scale to several servers?

2) Does Poekin support private channels and group channels (several people can be sent the same message)?

3) How can Poekin knows how to differentiate between clients, do I have to authenticate the client, use cookies?

4) When working with several servers in order to scale Poekin performance, does the channel object is shares between the servers? (I though using Amazon ElasticCache to save userId connections in a single global object in cache)

5) Is there a limit of number of channels that can be active at once?

6) How many people can be connected to a channel? - I want to be able to send hundreds of thousands of people a message if they are on a specific page on my site, and if they are on specific page on the site they are connected to a specific channel. So if 1000 people for example are at page.aspx?id=2, they will receive messages from channel 2 when it's updated, if the are on page.aspx?id=2,3 they will receive messages from channel 2 and 3 when those messages are pushed from the server to the client

From my understanding Poekin is a DLL, which means that it loads with my website. That means that it's not independent of the application. So how can I scale it? - If I use Amazon ElasticBean to scale my site, I wanted to know if it can scale with it, if it can scale on several servers behind a load balancer, and i so, is there a way to bridge the connections / objects between the several active servers and what if I decide to close on server behind a load balancer?

Thanks

Answer 1

Answer : http://www.pokein.com/Discussions/tabid/62/forumid/1/threadid/1231/scope/posts/Default.aspx