node.js pass socket.io socket to forked process

Question

I'm wondering if there is any way to pass a socket.io socket to a forked process in node.js, or reconstruct a socket.io socket in the forked process?

child = require("child_process").fork("worker.js")
io.sockets.on("connection", function(socket){
    child.send("socket", socket); //this definitely fails now
})

Answer 1

Solution : Use Redis

Im sure you will be happy to know about the existance of socket.io-redis

With it you will be able to send/receive events (share clients) between multiple instances of your code (processes or servers). Read more : socket.io-redis (Github Repo.)

With this you can scale :

1. vertically (increase the number of threads per machine)
2. horizontally (deploy more "masters" accross more machines)

There is an example app at github

This is a very simple Node.JS client/server application that shows how to setup Express.js, Socket.IO 1.x and socket.io-redis together.

This is very useful as a starting point to understand how to scale Socket.IO RealTime Applications that need multiple server processes. Redis is used as a storage point (adapter) in order to run multiple socket.io instances in different processes or servers that can all broadcast and emit events to and from each other.