Scaling WebSockets to 100k Connections: Lessons from a Real-Time Cricket App

When Virat Kohli walks to the crease, traffic on a cricket scoring app doesn't climb gradually — it spikes vertically. One moment you have 5,000 connected users, three minutes later you have 120,000, and every single one wants a push notification on the next ball. That graph broke our first attempt at real-time at Xenotix Labs . Here's what we learned rebuilding it. The naive stack (don't do this) Our first iteration: one Node.js process running socket.io, every connected client subscribed to ev