Shibin Das Probes SSE Limits Ahead of DrupalCon Vienna Talk

In a LinkedIn post shared days ahead of his DrupalCon Vienna session, Shibin Das described a scenario familiar to many working on real-time architectures. On a 2 GB server, Shibin anticipated handling around 250 simultaneous SSE connections based on PHP memory usage calculations. In practice, the server began rejecting new connections after just eight clients were connected.

He reviewed usual suspects such as pm.max_children settings and connection timeouts but found no immediate bottleneck. Now, he is calling on developers who have attempted SSE-based systems in Drupal to share their experiences, including tuning strategies that worked, architectural decisions that mattered most, and how offloading or hybrid approaches performed under real conditions.

This inquiry is not just academic. Shibin will present “Supercharging Drupal with Real-Time Notifications Using WebSockets and Redis” at DrupalCon Vienna on October 16. His session explores how a self-hosted notification server built with Node.js, Redis, and WebSockets can bring interactivity like live notifications and dashboards to Drupal without relying on commercial services such as Firebase or Pusher.

The question now is whether SSE, a lighter and more native browser technology, can scale effectively enough for use in Drupal under certain constraints or if WebSockets remain the more viable long-term choice for real-time needs. Shibin’s willingness to share results and ask for community feedback adds practical depth to a session already promising a full-stack walkthrough from architecture to frontend implementation.