sandeepone / sseserver

:surfer: High-performance Server-Sent Events endpoint for Go

package sseserver

An encapsulated high-performance Server-Sent Events endpoint server for Go with advanced namespacing support.

Abstracts multiple namespaced HTTP endpoints so that clients can subscribe to messages on on a specific topic. Should be thread-safe, so you can run multiple instances concurrently (for example, on different ports) if needed.

Designed for high throughput as primary performance consideration. In my preliminary benchmarking this can handle ~100K/sec messages broadcast across ~1000 open HTTP connections on a 3.4GHz Intel Core i7 (using a single core, e.g. with GOMAXPROCS=1). There still remains quite a bit of optimization to be done so it should get faster if needed.

This currently powers the streaming service for Emojitracker in production, where it has routinely handled dispatching hundreds of messages per second to thousands of clients simultaneously, on a single Heroku dyno. (The previous NodeJS solution required dozens of dynos to handle the same load.)

Why SSE vs Websockets?

Words will go here. In the meantime, there is a semi-decent discussion on StackOverflow about the topic.

API

See the godocs.

Admin Page

By default, an admin status page is available for easy monitoring:

Example Usage

A simple Go program utilizing this package:

package main

import (
    "github.com/mroth/sseserver"
    "time"
)

func main() {
    s := sseserver.NewServer() // create a server instance

    // broadcast the time every second to the "/time" namespace
    go func() {
        ticker := time.Tick(time.Duration(1 * time.Second))
        for {
            // wait for the ticker to fire
            t := <-ticker
            // create the message payload, can be any []byte value
            data := []byte(t.Format("3:04:05 pm (MST)"))
            // send a message without an event on the "/time" namespace
            s.Broadcast <- sseserver.SSEMessage{"", data, "/time"}
        }
    }()

    // simulate sending some scoped events on the "/pets" namespace
    go func() {
        time.Sleep(time.Duration(5 * time.Second))
        s.Broadcast <- sseserver.SSEMessage{"new-dog", []byte("Corgi"), "/pets"}
        s.Broadcast <- sseserver.SSEMessage{"new-cat", []byte("Persian"), "/pets"}
        time.Sleep(time.Duration(1 * time.Second))
        s.Broadcast <- sseserver.SSEMessage{"new-dog", []byte("Terrier"), "/pets"}
        s.Broadcast <- sseserver.SSEMessage{"new-dog", []byte("Dauchsand"), "/pets"}
        time.Sleep(time.Duration(2 * time.Second))
        s.Broadcast <- sseserver.SSEMessage{"new-cat", []byte("LOLcat"), "/pets"}
    }()

    s.Serve(":8001") // bind to port and beging serving connections
}

All these event namespaces are exposed via HTTP endpoint in the /subscribe/:namespace route.

On the client, we can easily connect to those endpoints using built-in functions in JS:

// connect to an event source endpoint and print results
es1 = new EventSource("http://localhost:8001/subscribe/time");
es1.onmessage = function(event) {
    console.log("TICK! The time is currently: " + event.data);
};

// connect to a different event source endpoint and register event handlers
es2 = new EventSource("http://localhost:8001/subscribe/pets")
es2.addEventListener("new-dog", function(event) {
    console.log("WOOF! Hello " + event.data);
}, false);
es2.addEventListener("new-cat", function(event) {
    console.log("MEOW! Hello " + event.data);
}, false);

Which when connecting to the server would yield results:

TICK! The time is currently: 6:07:17 pm (EDT)
TICK! The time is currently: 6:07:18 pm (EDT)
TICK! The time is currently: 6:07:19 pm (EDT)
TICK! The time is currently: 6:07:20 pm (EDT)
WOOF! Hello Corgi
MEOW! Hello Persian
TICK! The time is currently: 6:07:21 pm (EDT)
WOOF! Hello Terrier
WOOF! Hello Dauchsand
TICK! The time is currently: 6:07:22 pm (EDT)
TICK! The time is currently: 6:07:23 pm (EDT)
MEOW! Hello LOLcat
TICK! The time is currently: 6:07:24 pm (EDT)  

Of course you could easily send JSON objects in the data payload instead, and most likely will be doing this often.

Another advantage of the SSE protocol is that the wire-format is so simple. Unlike WebSockets, we can connect with curl to an endpoint directly and just read what's going on:

$ curl http://localhost:8001/subscribe/pets
event:new-dog
data:Corgi

event:new-cat
data:Persian

event:new-dog
data:Terrier

event:new-dog
data:Dauchsand

event:new-cat
data:LOLcat

Yep, it's that simple.

Namespace Nesting

A client can subscribe to a parent namespace. E.g. a subscription to /pets will receive messages broadcast to both /pets/dogs and /pets/cats.

Acknowledgements

A lot of the initial ideas for handling the connection hub in idiomatic Go originally came from cribbing from Gary Burd's go-websocket-chat, but has now been modified to work with SSE instead of Websockets and to be encapsulated in a thread-safe way.