SignalR scaleout with Azure for chat scenario

Question

For a chat application, I use Azure architecture with SignalR, with the web-role acting as SignalR server (the messages are not broadcast type but are intended for specific user/client).

I want to scale out SignalR server along with the web-roles, to handle heavy user load. Although, SignalR documentation doesn't recommend to use the pre-baked SignalR scale out methods using backplane (Redis, Service bus) for such cases when the number of messages increase as more users are connected (or in user-event driven scenario). It explicitly states: "Client-to-client (eg, chat): In this scenario, the backplane might be a bottleneck if the number of messages scales with the number of clients; that is, if the rate of messages grows proportionally as more clients join."

Question: Does anyone know of any custom scale-out solution for such high-frequency case, which doesn't push messages to each server instance or some other scale-out solution?

Already looked everywhere in SignalR documentation and the related videos but couldn't find anything, other than a word "filtered-bus", which was not explained what it is and how it should be used.

Answer 1

I figured it out myself: Basic idea is server affinity/sticky sessions.

Each instance of web-role acts as a stand-alone SignalR server. At the first connection time, I let the Azure load balancer choose any instance of web-role and save the IP address of that web-role instance with the client identifier in a map. If there is another connect request coming from the same client (eg after page refresh) then I check the IP address of the current role instance and if it matches the entry in map then I let it proceed otherwise I disconnect the client and connects it to the correct instance of web-role.

Each instance of worker-role also acts as SignalR .net client and connects to all the available SignalR servers (all instances of web-role). Before sending a message to the SignalR server (web-role), I look up in the map to determine the correct SignalR server instance (depending on the intended JS recipient).

Benefits :

• There is no need of back-plane technology (and hence no delays in message delivery).

• Each web-role instance care about the client connected to it and each message doesn't have to be duplicated on every SignalR server. Hence it can scale pretty good.

• Easy to implement.