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BUILDING SCALABLE BREAKOUT ROOMS USING NODE.JS WORKER THREADS Srushtika Neelakantam Developer Relations Engineer at Ably Realtime

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HELLO! I’M SRUSHTIKA DevRel Engineer @Srushtika

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Let’s see breakout rooms in action TIME FOR A FUN QUIZ! 3 @Srushtika | Brighton Web Dev Meetup | https://quiz.ably.dev/

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BREAKOUT ROOMS FUNCTIONALITY 1. How does realtime messaging work? 2. How to make use of Node.js worker threads to efficiently simulate dedicated server instances for each breakout room? @Srushtika | Brighton Web Dev Meetup |

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HTTP WebSockets vs. @Srushtika | Brighton Web Dev Meetup |

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Publish/Subscribe messaging pattern Feature add-ons ● Presence ● Message History ● Integrations . . . Infrastructure add-ons ● Auto reconnection ● Scale ● Guaranteed delivery ● Message ordering . . . P.S. This is an old gif, Ably has moved on to new branding now. @Srushtika | Brighton Web Dev Meetup |

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BREAKOUT ROOMS FUNCTIONALITY 1. How does realtime messaging work? ✅ 2. How to make use of Node.js worker threads to efficiently simulate dedicated server instances for each breakout room? @Srushtika | Brighton Web Dev Meetup |

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WORKER THREADS IN NODE.JS @Srushtika | Brighton Web Dev Meetup |

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HOW DOES NODE.JS WORK? @Srushtika | Brighton Web Dev Meetup |

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KEY ELEMENTS THAT MAKE NODE.JS WORK The chrome v8 engine converts JavaScript to machine readable code The libuv library provides and manages the event loop and thread pool @Srushtika | Brighton Web Dev Meetup |

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GREAT EXPLANATION OF EVENT LOOP BY PHILIP ROBERTS (JSConfEU on YouTube) @Srushtika | Brighton Web Dev Meetup |

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“Node.js is a CPU bottleneck due to its single-threaded nature. That’s one of its major drawbacks” @Srushtika | Brighton Web Dev Meetup |

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WORKER THREADS IN NODE.JS @Srushtika | Brighton Web Dev Meetup |

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NODE.JS WORKER THREADS ARCHITECTURE @Srushtika | Brighton Web Dev Meetup | Image source: The NodeSource Blog

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@Srushtika | Brighton Web Dev Meetup |

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Let’s see some real code https://github.com/ably-labs/realtime-quiz-framework @Srushtika | Brighton Web Dev Meetup |

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BREAKOUT ROOMS FUNCTIONALITY 1. How does realtime messaging work? ✅ 2. How to make use of Node.js worker threads to efficiently simulate dedicated server instances for each breakout room? ✅ @Srushtika | Brighton Web Dev Meetup |

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CAVEATS AND OTHER THINGS - Don’t use Worker threads for parallelizing I/O operations, the native Node architecture can do that more quickly - Creating worker threads is not cheap, so it’s better to create and use a thread pool instead - If there are async methods available, it’s better to use them, rather than off-loading to your own worker thread @Srushtika | Brighton Web Dev Meetup |

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Thankyou! @Srushtika | Brighton Web Dev Meetup | Further reading - NodeJS docs: https://nodejs.org/api/worker_threads.html - Demo source code: https://github.com/Srushtika/realtime-quiz-framework - “What the heck is an event loop anyway?”: https://youtu.be/8aGhZQkoFbQ - “Introduction to libuv: What's a Unicorn Velociraptor?”: https://youtu.be/_c51fcXRLGw - Realtime concepts: https://ably.com/topics