Implement room instancing in socketio-server.js

[vincentfretin]

Use case: experience with 3000 users, using room instancing by batch of 50 users, no audio, no video, only websocket. We are interested only in avatar movements.

For 50 in a room, you probably want to reduce the update rate to 1 per second instead of 15 by setting NAF.options.updateRate = 1 (doc)

If you test it inside the networked-aframe repo, be sure to use npm run dev-socketio and setting networked-scene="adapter:socketio" in the basic.html or basic-chat.html examples.

Be aware there are pending issues with the socketio adapter:

• Client doesn't properly reconnect when the server restart #242
• Implement keepalive message in socketio adapter #243

That's a quick implementation I tested only with maxOccupantsInRoom = 3 instead of 50.
I didn't test the load. Someone has to create a script to test 3000 connections, creating the websocket, sending avatar positions every second, do that for a random duration about 30 seconds to 3 min for each connection and close the websocket connection to see how the node process supports the load.

If someone wants to go further, some things to be tested for cpu/memory/latency:

• Use a more performance framework, replace express by fastify (nodejs only) or hono (on deno or bun), or h3 (on node or deno or bun)
• Replace socketio by a more efficient websocket implementation (ws on nodejs?), modify the socketio adapter to use WebSocket directly instead of socketio.
• Or rewrite the server part entirely in golang or rust/tokio or elixir/phoenix

[Utopiah]

I'd be curious about metrics here, i.e how many users (10, 100, 1000...) managed on which hardware (RPi Zero, RPi5, i9...) and what is the bottleneck.

[vincentfretin]

If you need perf, I'll probably rewriting server/socketio-server.js with
https://github.com/uNetworking/uWebSockets.js
You can still use socketio lib on the client side I guess.