ws-derp

0.0.2 • Public • Published

ws-derp - Derp Up Your Socket.IO

Socket.IO is awesome - it makes Websockets practical and clean, and Just Works so you don't have to work around browser bugs. It's as essential for WebSockets, now, as jQuery would have been to us in 2002.

With Socket.IO on/emit, you're probably used to frames like this:

5:::{"name":"myFn","args":[[{"id":1,"x":2,"y":3}]]}

That's quite polite, but a lot of characters. Enter ws-derp.

ws-derp will help you derp up your message/send channel, which you probably aren't using if you do on/emit. You can hand it an api (for instance, for sending arrays of numbers), and your sockets on both server and client will understand how to create frames that look more like this:

3:::1`6~-Y`Z~

Smaller!

(See below for notes on why you might do something like this -- TL;DR: websockets are a wild west, which is why we have Socket.IO; gzipped frames are still evolving; binary encoding libs don't yet offer fallbacks like Socket.IO does; custom encoding like this is more work but can be a foolproof way of getting guaranteed-small frame sizes).

Installation

npm install ws-derp

Usage

{TinySocketApi, Coders} = require 'ws-derp'
{int_args, int_list} = Coders

ts = new TinySocketApi
  serverListens:
    clientNumberAnnouncement: int_args 2, (val...)->
      console.log " TWO-BYTE NUMBER! OMG OMG #{ val }"
  clientListens:
    serverNumberList: int_list 2, (s...)->
      console.log " LIST OF NUMS! OMG OMG #{ s }"

...
# get a socket.io socket somewhere
...

# take the server role on this socket
# on the client it would be: `ts.setClient( socket )`
ts.setServer( socket )

# now our listeners are hooked up, and the socket has
# been extended with the send method:
socket.serverNumberList [1234,2345,3456]

You would want to share the definition of the api - the hash passed to TinySocketApi - between client and server (I assume you're using something like Browserify).

You could customize the callbacks, but it'd be important that the keys of the clientListens and serverListens hashes, and the Coders that determine the type of the args, be the same.

What Goes Over The Wire?

In the example above, probably 3::~6++)>7

  • the long function names are turned into the base-93 encoding of their alphabetic order, so serverNumberList becomes ~
  • the array gets e93-encoded and turns into 6++)>7
  • Socket.IO adds 3::: which means it's a raw message, as distinct from a connect, disconnect, emit, or other Socket.IO frame type.

Encoders/Decoders

int_args and int_list are defined in class Coders via:

int_list = (bytes, fn) ->
  Coders.define_coder [[pc.a2s, pc.s2a, bytes]], fn

Where pc.a2s and s2a are function-creating-functions that take a number of bytes/chars/places and return a function for consuming that many from a sequence (string, array) and return a [parsedValue, restOfSequence] pair.

PackedCalls

The functions are called via PackedCalls.unpacker.

PackedCalls.unpacker [someArgsConsumer, otherArgsConsumer], fn

Which creates a function that will convert its arguments using the argument consumers before passing them to the callback.

PackedCalls contains a few consumers defined at the class level, and they're used above: s2a, a2s, s2i, i2s, which are for converting arrays and integers to strings and back.

Basic Conversion Functions

We have an Alphabet class built on the bases module, adding the ability to convert in both directions. The Conversions class has to_i and to_s methods based on a 93-character alphabet.

{Conversions} = require 'ws-derp'
{alphabet, to_i, to_s} = Conversions
#### Every Part of the Websocket Buffalo

The Websockets standard is UTF-8, and people often use it to send JSON. Socket.io uses JSON by default when you use .on() or .emit(), so that

socket.emit 'myFn', [{id:1,x:2,y:3}]

# creates websocket frames like:

5:::{"name":"myFn","args":[[{"id":1,"x":2,"y":3}]]}

That's not optimal, but it's not trying to be optimal in that sense, and doesn't need to be - the benefit of
open-socket-versus-polling is so great that optimizing the actual frames would be a waste of time for almost anyone, especially since frames are often gzipped.

And in fact for more general single-page-app projects, you're probably already using something like backbone.js that sends hashes back and forth, and you can drop websockets in as a transport and get a nice speed boost.

But for some kinds of real-time, like multiplayer games, it makes sense to have one channel that's really optimized for the core updates, like entity positions each tick.

Isn't There A Standard Derp?

Surely the standard supports some super-sweet methods of compression? Like JSONP? Or, hey - if you're sending numbers, real binary communication?

That's all coming - and it'll be great. Even IE10 supports sending binary data over WebSockets. And libraries like BinaryJS knit together the browsers that do support 'real' binary, and it provides good custom msgpack-based encoding with to strings.

But BinaryJS doesn't have fallbacks as of this writing, and fallbacks -- making websockets work reliably cross-browser -- is a big pain with a lot of edge cases. And cross-browser gzip is still emerging (to detect redundancy in such small messages, gzip really would need to 'remember' what it's seen in prior frames, which would be a significant increase in implementation complexity for the various browsers).

When BinaryJS comes with socket.io-like transport fallbacks, or when gzip like this is the norm in all WebSocket implementations, then far better derping will be available. We're probably only a year or two out from widespread adoption of websockets that take ArrayBuffers and blobs and such. And we're surely only a few patches away from fallbacks in the binary websockets projects, since Socket.io has them. How to best do gzip for frames in a way that can be implemented by clients is, as the link indicates, a heckofathing - but it's one that google's apparently interested in.

But at the moment, if you want to make your frames smaller with the cross-browser just-works of Socket.io, you'll have to make them smaller yourself.

Custom Derps

You could just use .send() from the websockets standard, which socket.io also provides, and send a delimited separated sequence of updates -- for instance, two x/y pairs might be:

3:::myFn[1234,89352,123,392]

That's a lot smaller. You need to provide your own dispatch table - your own implementation of the "name":"myFn" part of the socket.io approach. A little logic, no big.

But there are still two sources of inefficiency:

  1. The function name. myFn is 4 bytes long. Seems short, but how many functions are there in your API brah?? Math.pow(58, 4) functions??

  2. The contents are base-10 numbers written in a base-255 medium: utf-8.

    In practice we can only use from base-58 to base-93, and utf-8 is actually only base-128 for our purposes, but any of that would be quite an improvement on base-10! (Oooh, and the ws Quake encodes into 2-character pairs - very smart).

    gzip would whittle down the improvement with larger message bodies, but the nature of websocket frames is that they'll likely be smallish and frequent.

So that's what I played around with.

Why?!?

None of this is necessary. Really.

It's comforting to know the exact size of the messages we send. We can start reasoning on what's possible, and make informed tradeoffs re: number of messages and their weight and number of clients.

But the conversions code - I'd have probably used msgpack for the format instead of rolling my own alphabet-based one if I had remembered what it was called, instead of googling fruitlessly around 'JSONP' and coming up with nothing.

Likewise with the client-server binding and the one-character api dispatching - it's cute, but it'll never be a big deal from a performance perspective; I was just having fun hacking and making the messages as small as possible.

As one of my coworkers pointed out, the packet boundaries are the only really important upper bounds to optimize for -- if you're sending a frame small enough that it'll fit in under the packet size for ethernet transport, then it's optimally sized, and you won't get much faster by slimming the packet down!

(Although some people new to websockets also sometimes assume that there's a minimum chunk/frame/packet size stuck into the standard somewhere, and that that might be determinant, and of course there really isn't).

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