Instant Messaging at LinkedIn: Scaling to Hundreds of Thousands of Persistent Connections on One Machine | LinkedIn Engineering

We recently introduced Instant Messaging on LinkedIn, complete with typing indicators and read receipts. To make this happen, we needed a way to push data from the server to mobile and web clients over persistent connections instead of the traditional request-response paradigm that most modern applications are built on. In this post, we’ll describe the mechanisms we use to instantly send messages, typing indicators, and read receipts to clients as soon as they arrive. We’ll describe how we used the Play Framework and the Akka Actor Model to manage Server-sent events-based persistent connections. We’ll also provide insights into how we did load testing on our server to manage hundreds of thousands of concurrent persistent connections in production. Finally, we’ll share optimization techniques that we picked up along the way.

Source: Instant Messaging at LinkedIn: Scaling to Hundreds of Thousands of Persistent Connections on One Machine | LinkedIn Engineering