At CometChat, we know that platform stability & performance is of utmost importance to our customers and their users.With that in mind, we've always kept a keen eye on building a culture of testing and continuous improvement.
We recently reached a new performance milestone, demonstrating that CometChat’s WebSockets infrastructure can easily handle heavy concurrency while pushing a substantial amount of live data.
In these initial tests, we have been able to support well over 1 million concurrent connections in a single chat group (also known as channel or room). This engineering milestone strengthens CometChat’s position as the most favored in-app chat provider for organizations with a large user base.
CometChat currently powers messaging and calling for over 10 million active users with a 99.99% uptime guarantee.
Before walking through CometChat’s latest accomplishment, it’s important to understand a little about what concurrency and concurrent tests are.
In simple words, concurrency is the number of computations happening at the same time. It is defined as the total number of users active at the same time. Concurrency tests help in measuring the reliability and robustness of any software infrastructure under the pressure of scaling users.
CometChat’s Most Recent Milestone at a Glance!
CometChat’s concurrency tests were designed to test various real-world use cases, with almost 5 million messages exchanged per second at the highest load.
One of the most prominent performance testing tools used for conducting concurrency tests is Apache JMeter. We used the JMeter to conduct concurrency tests on our WebSockets-based solution. Nearly 5 million messages were exchanged with an average response time of fewer than 50 milliseconds.
After a few architectural enhancements to CometChat’s infrastructure, we were able to successfully achieve 1 million+ concurrent connections in CometChat V3 within a timeframe of 20 minutes. This is equivalent to 20 million monthly active users at approximately 5% concurrency.
We performed several benchmark tests, in order to simulate 15K, 20K, 25K, etc, up to 1M concurrent users from a single instance of CometChat WebSocket server. The latency was measured for all messages, not only for a sample. The average latency for messages sent remained well within 50 milliseconds throughout the test while maintaining the overall stability of the platform.
Along with mean latency, we’ve measured the maximum latency and standard deviation for the latency during 20 minutes, and the results are mentioned above. We’ve also run the most demanding scenario with over a million concurrent connections during several hours and observed that the server remains perfectly stable.
How We Got There — Our Journey
In December 2020, we started innovating on CometChat’s platform using a new real-time technology, WebSockets — the backbone which supports our real-time chat infrastructure. When we started designing our V3 chat widget, we wanted to make sure that it works for every use case, including the bursts of concurrency in live events.
In April 2021, we released the beta version which instantly benefited customers, who found the higher concurrency and rate limits to be a game-changer, especially for live events. One such example is that of a multinational event services company — LiveGroup — and how CometChat helped them innovate their approach to live events through its chat functionality. To read more about their success, check out their case study here.
What’s Next?
We’re constantly pushing our technology and testing to ensure stable scalability and performance for our customers and end-users.
This is just the beginning, and we are confident that these numbers fall far behind the upper threshold of the system’s capacity. In the months to come, we’re planning to continue scaling and testing our infrastructure to ensure we deliver industry-leading stability and scalability of in-app chat and messaging for our customers.
Many big and small tech companies trust and support CometChat’s in-app chat solution to drive seamless engagement amongst their users. Check out these case studies to see how some of them leveraged CometChat for their business:
Kokilaben Hospital in Mumbai pivoted to a telehealth model to innovate their approach to patient insights in the peak of the pandemic using CometChat.
How Aarya Digital partnered with CometChat to create a digital experience that fosters trust, confidence, and higher customer satisfaction.
How HeySummit successfully scaled, with CometChat, to meet the rising demand for virtual events during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Live Group, an event services company focused on sustainability, leveraged CometChat’s chat solution to improve their live events experience.
It’s easy to get started with CometChat’s APIs if your application requires a reliable, easy-to-use in-app chat solution without the need to maintain back-end chat architecture at scale. Just sign up to our developer dashboard and start building your chat app. It’s free!
If you have any questions or need to discuss your project privately, feel free to get in touch with us so we can help you build your chat application hassle-free.
About the Author
Swahani is a marketing specialist at CometChat, joining in May of 2021. She's interested in all things tech, with previous experience writing about the blockchain, data science, and analytics domains. Swahani received a B.Tech degree in Information Technology and Engineering from Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar Technological University (Dr. BATU).
Swahani Roy
CometChat
