shitsocket

ShitSocket

ShitSocket emaulates Socket.io-based websocket connections over laggy connections by adding random delays to the propogation of messages.

Message ordering is preserved; where the delay of the 1st message is greater than the 2nd, the 2nd will be held up until the first is ready to send. This will have the effect of clustering messages, which mimics the behavior of slower network connections reasonably well.

Why would you do this? ShitSocket is designed to help you write websocket code that is resilient to slower network connections, by giving you a good test case on your local development environment.

Usage

Where you would normally connect to a socket.io socket:

var io = require('socket.io');

var socket = io.connect('http://example.org');

Instead wrap the connect() call in a ShitSocket constructor:

var io = require('socket.io');
var socket = io.connect('http://example.org');
var ShitSocket = require('shitsocket');

var socket = new ShitSocket(io.connect('http://example.org'));

By default, the delays on message will be a random amount between 0 and 500ms. To change the upper limit, pass a 2nd argument to the ShitSocket constructor.

var okaySocket = new ShitSocket(io.connect('http://example.org'), 50);
var awfulSocket = new ShitSocket(io.connect('http://example.org'), 5000);