We use the same system in other areas of the site like comments, posts, etc. Mainly this graph is to show how many messages per minute we got in the chat.
Pretty impressive performance especially considering you just rolled it out (and talk about a trial by fire). Looks like you put together a very scalable system. How much of it was custom and how much (if any) was a third party product or library?
It was mostly custom. For live message pushing (not just in chat, but also comments and the watchlist stream) we use a service called Pusher, similar to how we use Amazon S3 to host our images.
thanks for adding the reply feature so quickly, in the chat i asked if as time goes on we could see features such as chat descriptions/ tags to help users find the chatrooms they'd most like to be in. It would also help reduce the number of duplicate rooms and help keep conversations on topic.
That's fantastic and crazy all wraped up into one. As was the live stream. Looking forward to the next one and to see what else ye have in store for us. Thanks for the third greatest gift ever, laughter.
Any chance of being able to view the stream post live. I'm sure I'm not the only one who misses things likes this often due to odd schedule or time zones but still enjoys watching them after the fact.
I missed out on the live chat because I was asleep but I'm loving the new chat system. The only thing it's really missing is the ability to change each comment so it takes up less vertical space, like decreasing the avatar size and possibly putting in a time stamp next to the user name and removing the reply button? Something that makes it more chat like?
Watch
I'm on an iPhone 4 latest update and on a 3G network. It's like this on every page.