Two peers RTMFP Chat: should I use NetGroup or not?

Question

I made a Chat mainly inspired by the Cirrus Sample
Chat works fine, but on some cases, the "NetStream.Connect.Success" doesn't get triggered.
Both connections pass the ports check

Before switching to a NetGroup architecture and presuming that these problems are related to the connection process, I'd like to know :
- Would NetGroup act differently on NetStream connection process over a NetStream Direct Connection ?
- What are the limitations of NetGroup ? I read there was more latency when using it.

Answer 1

ok, so first and foremost, NetStream.Connect.Success fires on the NetConnection and not the NetStream. That is the biggest misconception and frustration for people trying to get this all set up. Adobe did this for legacy (historical) reasons. So check that first to make sure you are listening in the proper spot.

if you are sure you have the listener in the right spot, you may have NAT or firewall comms issues that prevent one peer from seeing the other in certain circumstances.

Now regarding groups:

NetGroup does not introduce latency (necessarily). In groups with less than 14 members, you have a full mesh (all members have a direct peer connection to all others). using a less than 14 member group will still net you a blazingly fast p2p connection provided you use sendToAllNeighbors(). Where you hear about latency is regarding post(). post runs a bunch of stuff that introduces new latency since it tries to contact my 3 descending, 3 ascending, my fractional connections, my 6 least latent and my 1 random every 10 seconds... and then tries to forward the message on to be distributed to the rest of the group. Even in small groups this can take a second or two.

Here is a link to a video from MAX that goes through all the nitty gritty (so to speak) on rtmfp and its ring based architecture Cool In-Depth Video About RTMFP