[sldev] Question: Replacing current group chat with XMPP?

[Paul Oppenheim (Poppy Linden)]

David M Chess wrote:
> I don't really understand this scaling argument.  In my experience, 
> neither "push everything everywhere" nor "constantly ask if there's 
> anything new" scales; what scales is actual pub/sub.  In the case of 
> group IM, messages get pushed by some server (or some cluster of 
> entities acting as a logical server) to all and only those places where 
> someone cares.  There's some overhead in keeping track of where there 
> are places that someone cares, but in most use-cases I've seen it's the 
> approach that scales the best.

Do you have any references / links / copypasta / personal stories on this kind of architecture research? I've been hungering for scalability research lately, and been surprised by much of what I've read. I would assume polling with caching would be much faster than pub/sub because you can use much dumber machinery, but I've also not investigated too many message queuing systems (I also don't work directly on IM). I can't speak for others on this list, but if you cook up a scalability resource mail you've got an audience of at least one ;)

+ poppy