Comet is not really brand-new (Ajax) term today; however, with most of people how it works remains somewhat mysterious.
I have a little hand-on experience with Comet when creating a hobby game project with DWR Reverse Ajax sometime ago. It (DWR) was simple to start and really worked but required a Java web server (Tomcat, Jetty…) that I found rather expensive (in term of resources) for such small application. I want a small, dedicated and reliable server for Comet apps while don’t like to be deeply sunk in technical terms like “Bayeux” or “Continuation”.
After reviewing the Comet Maturity Guide from Comet Daily I decided to give Meteor Comet server a try for several reasons, especially because it’s built on Perl that can be easily deployed in any server with Perl installed (i.e. almost all Linux servers, no?) and it should be lightweight (up to my experience with Perl). Here is other info about Meteor server:
- Server daemon will run on any platform for which Perl is available.
- In live use typically 1,000 clients per node receiving 2 msgs (~400 bytes) per sec each. Tested up to 5,000 clients per node receiving 1 msg/sec each.
- Nodes exist independently, supports broadcasting for message distribution. Cluster of three Meteor nodes runs FT Alphaville.
- Transports are completely configurable within simple constraints.
- Server supports client ‘catch-up’, allowing clients to regulate quality of service themselves.
- Stable, in production use.
- GPL v2. Free.
Install & Setup Meteor Server
You can find very good how-to guide for installing Meteor server from Meteorserver.org; actually it’s quite simple to follow. Just download, extract to default location (/usr/local/meteor) and configure daemon service as guided. One notice is on Fedora/Cent OS the start function in init scripts must be changed from:
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