Regions & latency

Socketly runs in one region today, US East. This page says what that costs you if you are somewhere else, so you can decide before you build rather than after.

What the round trip actually is

From western Europe to US East is roughly 80–100 ms round trip; from India, around 200 ms. A publish is one trip from your server to us, and one out to each subscriber — so for two European users talking to each other through Socketly, end-to-end is about twice the figure above.

Those numbers are the network, not us. A publish spends under a millisecond inside the gateway; the rest is the distance.

What that is comfortable for

Most of what people build on a realtime API does not notice 200 ms, because nobody is watching their own keystrokes echo:

Notifications and activity feeds
Build, job and deployment status
Chat and comments
Prices, tickers and dashboards
Presence — who is here, who just left
“Someone else changed this, reload”

What it is not

If a person is watching their own input travel — live cursors, collaborative text editing, anything where your own action round-trips before you see it — 200 ms is the difference between feeling instant and feeling laggy. We would rather tell you that now than have you discover it in a demo.

An app lives in one region

A region is a deployment boundary, not a setting. An app belongs to exactly one, and its channels, presence rosters and quotas live there with it. Two clients of the same app always meet in the same place, wherever they are connecting from.

This is why a region is chosen when an app is created and cannot be changed afterwards: moving an app would move its live sockets, and there is no way to do that without dropping every one of them. If you need to move, create a new app and cut over on your own schedule.

Your key knows where its app lives

The region is part of the key, so the client works out where to connect without asking us first — no extra round trip before the first message.

pk_app_a1b2c3d4e5f6a7b8_KOyHrgOjw4GoBFe0WVVjBq
                                  └─ no region segment: US East

pk_euc1_app_a1b2c3d4e5f6a7b8_KOyHrgOjw4GoBFe0WVVjBq
   └── region ──┘             a key that names its region

A key with no region segment belongs to US East. Every key issued so far is one of those, and they will keep working exactly as they are — the default region is permanent, not a migration step.

Asking for a region

More regions are planned, and which one comes next is decided by who asks. If US East is too far for what you are building, tell us where you need to be and roughly what you are running — that is the information that opens one, and the request is what moves it up the list.

Or write to support@socketly.co with “region” in the subject, if you would rather send it that way.