关于社交网站的IM /聊天系统的想法

Question

I'm creating a social network website, and I need a IM/chat solution for it.

The conversations are only one-on-one, with the users being able to chat only with their friends (i.e. Facebook chat - no channels, no rooms ...).

The website is made in CodeIgniter(PHP) with MySQL database. Probably will be put on VPS (Linux), so I might have control on the environment. Also, it is expected to have more than 100 000 users.

So, I need some ideas about how to make the chat.

My ideas so far:

• Ajax poll on every X seconds (not good solution for website this size)
• Implementing Jabber/XMPP system (I have no info about this, nor is it possible)
• Using 3rd party service (like Pusher.com)
• creating the chat in Node.js and socket.io, and having it independent from the other part of the website

After some research and reading some answers here on SO

https://stackoverflow.com/a/11362929/928540

https://stackoverflow.com/a/5654487/928540

I really like to go with the idea of Node.js and socket.io, so I would like to hear some opinions about it, and maybe some guidance, links, help, tutorial ...

Answer 1

Meteor might be a solution you could use. It's designed to create "live" applications and I bet building a one-on-one messaging system is a breeze.

I know it isn't PHP, but you mentioned using Node.js and I figured if you could use Node.js then you could use this.