Production quality Rails 4 chat demo?

Rails
1

Hi Everyone,

I’m trying to use Rails 4’s ActionController::Live functionality to do a
chat-like interface in my app. I’ve found a number of blog posts, all of
which seem to be based on Aaron P.'s original one here:
http://tenderlovemaking.com/2012/07/30/is-it-live.html

Has anyone here successfully gotten this to work well enough for
production? I assume that if it is included in Rails 4, there must be
some
way to get it to work.

I’ve run into two problems (at least!) and I see many comments about
these
problems, but it’s hard to tell what the definitive solution is.

I created a really trivial chat application for testing. It just ajaxes
anything the user types to the server, then uses redis and
ActionController:Live to push it to all clients.

My problems:

  1. All I have to do to crash the server is to refresh the web page
    repeatedly. Something is holding onto the connection, so I can trivially
    give myself a DOS.

  2. There is a timeout on the connection, so that if I leave the webpage
    up
    idling for a while, then it stops reacting to new events.

I have my own server, so I have flexibility in how I set it up. It is
currently using Apache/Passenger. I’d prefer to use that simply because
I
have experience with it, but I’d be willing to change to a different
server
configuration.

Thanks!