War Story: We Migrated from Socket.io 4.7 to Ably 2.0 and Cut Chat Latency 40% for Global Users

In Q3 2024, our team at a Series C messaging startup serving 1.2M monthly active users across 42 countries hit a wall: Socket.io 4.7’s p99 chat latency for users in Southeast Asia and South America had ballooned to 1.8 seconds, with 12% of messages failing to deliver during peak hours. We migrated to Ably 2.0 in 6 weeks, and cut global p99 latency by 40% to 1.08 seconds, eliminated 99% of reconnection storms, and reduced our realtime infra costs by 22%. 📡 Hacker News Top Stories Right Now Ghost