I want to use notification and i have read that Local and Push Notification is basely same, only difference is that push notification is
remote notification
The info comes from outside, and local Notification is local.I have also read that Push consumes 20% of battery usage.My question is that the Local notification is better in battery save or not?
thanks
Well, in both the cases it depends on the implementation and number of notifications user receives.
Push Notifications seems to consume lesser than the local notifications. But if the user has huge friends list (for example), then he/she would probably be getting lots of notifications and probably (as per your implementation) lots of notification alerts as well, then in this case even the Push Notifications consume good amount of power.
There is no difference, or if there is it's miniscule. In order to have notifications of any sort the device must "wake up" from time to time.
Since, in the general scheme of things, it's got to monitor for phone calls, messages, and push notifications for other apps, it's regularly "listening" for messages.
Likewise, many operations inside the device are based on timers, so the device is always running a timer and always ready for a time interval to expire.
Once the push notification has been received or the local notification timer has gone off, the logic inside your app is virtually identical, so there's no difference there.
The biggest difference would likely be on the setting side, but that could go one way or the other depending on how your app sets up notifications.
Related
Suppose I have an IoT device which I'm about to control (lets say switch on/off) and monitor (e.g. collect temperature readings). It seems MQTT could be the right fit. I could publish messages to the device to control it and the device could publish messages to a broker to report temperature readings. So far so good.
The problems start to occur when I try to design the API to control the device.
Lets day the device subscribes to two topics:
/device-id/control/on
/device-id/control/off
Then I publish messages to these topics in some order. But given the fact that messaging is typically an asynchronous process there are no guarantees on the order of messages received by the device.
So in case two messages are published in the following order:
/device-id/control/on
/device-id/control/off
they could be received in the reversed order leaving the device turned on, which can have dramatic consequences, depending on the context.
Of course the API could be designed in some other way, for example there could be just one topic
/device-id/control
and the payload of individual messages would carry the meaning of an individual message (on/off). So in case messages are published to this topic in a given order they are expected to be received in the exact same order on the device.
But what if the order of publishes to individual topics cannot be guaranteed? Suppose the following architecture of a system for IoT devices:
/ control service \
application -> broker -> control service -> broker -> IoT device
\ control service /
The components of the system are:
an application which effectively controls the device by publishing messages to a broker
a typical message broker
a control service with some business logic
The important part is that as in most modern distributed systems the control service is a distributed, multi instance entity capable of processing multiple control messages from the application at a time. Therefore the order of messages published by the application can end up totally mixed when delivered to the IoT device.
Now given the fact that most MQTT brokers only implement QoS0 and QoS1 but no QoS2 it gets even more interesting as such control messages could potentially be delivered multiple times (assuming QoS1 - see https://stackoverflow.com/a/30959058/1776942).
My point is that separate topics for control messages is a bad idea. The same goes for a single topic. In both cases there are no message delivery order guarantees.
The only solution to this particular issue that comes to my mind is message versioning so that old (out-dated) messages could simply be skipped when delivered after another message with more recent version property.
Am I missing something?
Is message versioning the only solution to this problem?
Am I missing something?
Most definitely. The example you brought up is a generic control system, being attached to some message-oriented scheme. There are a number of patterns that can be used when referring to a message-based architecture. This article by Microsoft categorizes message patterns into two primary classes:
Commands and
Events
The most generic pattern of command behavior is to issue a command, then measure the state of the system to verify the command was carried out. If you forget to verify, your system has an open loop. Such open loops are (unfortunately) common in IT systems (because it's easy to forget), and often result in bugs and other bad behaviors such as the one described above. So, the proper way to handle a command is:
Issue the command
Inquire as to the state of the system
Evaluate next action
Events, on the other hand, are simply fired off. As the publisher of an event, it is not my business to worry about who receives the event, in what order, etc. Now, it should also be pointed out that the use of any decent message broker (e.g. RabbitMQ) generally carries strong guarantees that messages will be delivered in the order which they were originally published. Note that this does not mean they will be processed in order.
So, if you treat a command as an event, your system is guaranteed to act up sooner or later.
Is message versioning the only solution to this problem?
Message versioning typically refers to a property of the message class itself, rather than a particular instance of the class. It is often used when multiple versions of a message-based API exist and must be backwards-compatible with one another.
What you are instead referring to is unique message identifiers. Guids are particularly handy for making sure that each message gets its own unique id. However, I would argue that de-duplication in message-based architectures is an anti-pattern. One of the consequences of using messaging is that duplicates are possible, so you should try to design your system behaviors to be stateless and idempotent. If this is not possible, it should be considered that messaging may not be the correct communication solution for the need.
Using the command-event dichotomy as an example, you could perform the following transaction:
The controller issues the command, assigning a unique identifier to the command.
The control system receives the command and turns on.
The control system publishes the "light on" event notification, containing the unique id of the command that was used to turn on the light.
The controller receives the notification and correlates it to the original command.
In the event that the controller doesn't receive notification after some timeout, the controller can retry the command. Note that "light on" is an idempotent command, in that multiple calls to it will have the same effect.
When state changes, send the new state immediately and after that periodically every x seconds. With this solution your systems gets into desired state, after some time, even when it temporarily disconnects from the network (low battery).
BTW: You did not miss anything.
Apart from the comment that most brokers don't support QOS2 (I suspect you mean that a number of broker as a service offerings don't support QOS2, such as Amazon's AWS IoT service) you have covered most of the major points.
If message order really is that important then you will have to include some form of ordering marker in the message payload, be this a counter or timestamp.
We are using socketIO on a large chat application.
At some points we want to dispatch "presence" (user availability) to all other users.
io.in('room1').emit('availability:update', {userid='xxx', isAvailable: false});
room1 may contains a lot of users (500 max). We observe a significant raise in our NodeJS load when many availability updates are triggered.
The idea was to use something similar to redis store with Socket IO. Have web browser clients to connect to different NodeJS servers.
When we want to emit to a room we dispatch the "emit to room1" payload to all other NodeJS processes using Redis PubSub ZeroMQ or even RabbitMQ for persistence. Each process will itself call his own io.in('room1').emit to target his subset of connected users.
One of the concern with this setup is that the inter-process communication may become quite busy and I was wondering if it may become a problem in the future.
Here is the architecture I have in mind.
Could you batch changes and only distribute them every 5 seconds or so? In other words, on each node server, simply take a 'snapshot' every X seconds of the current state of all users (e.g. 'connected', 'idle', etc.) and then send that to the other relevant servers in your cluster.
Each server then does the same, every 5 seconds or so it sends the same message - of only the changes in user state - as one batch object array to all connected clients.
Right now, I'm rather surprised you are attempting to send information about each user as a packet. Batching seems like it would solve your problem quite well, as it would also make better use of standard packet sizes that are normally transmitted via routers and switches.
You are looking for this library:
https://github.com/automattic/socket.io-redis
Which can be used with this emitter:
https://github.com/Automattic/socket.io-emitter
About available users function, I think there are two alternatives,you can create a "queue Users" where will contents "public data" from connected users or you can use exchanges binding information for show users connected. If you use an "user's queue", this will be the same for each "room" and you could update it when an user go out, "popping" its state message from queue (Although you will have to "reorganize" all queue message for it).
Nevertheless, I think that RabbitMQ is designed for asynchronous communication and it is not very useful approximation have a register for presence or not from users. I think it's better for applications where you don't know when the user will receive the message and its "real availability" ("fire and forget architectures"). ZeroMQ require more work from zero but you could implement something more specific for your situation with a better performance.
An publish/subscribe example from RabbitMQ site could be a good point to begin a new design like yours where a message it's sent to several users at same time. At summary, I will create two queues for user (receive and send queue messages) and I'll use specific exchanges for each "room chat" controlling that users are in each room using exchange binding's information. Always you have two queues for user and you create exchanges to binding it to one or more "chat rooms".
I hope this answer could be useful for you ,sorry for my bad English.
This is the common approach for sharing data across several Socket.io processes. You have done well, so far, with a single process and a single thread. I could lamely assume that you could pick any of the mentioned technologies for communicating shared data without hitting any performance issues.
If all you need is IPC, you could perhaps have a look at Faye. If, however, you need to have some data persisted, you could start a Redis cluster with as many Redis masters as you have CPUs, though this will add minor networking noise for Pub/Sub.
I'm working on a server architecture for sending/receiving messages from remote embedded devices, which will be hosted on Windows Azure. The front-facing servers are going to be maintaining persistent TCP connections with these devices, and I need a way to communicate with them on the backend.
Problem facts:
Devices: ~10,000
Frequency of messages device is sending up to servers: 1/min
Frequency of messages originating server side (e.g. from user actions, scheduled triggers, etc.): 100/day
Average size of message payload: 64 bytes
Upward communication
The devices send up messages very frequently (sensor readings). The constraints for that data are not very strong, due to the fact that we can aggregate/insert those sensor readings in a batched manner, and that they don't require in-order guarantees. I think the best way of handling them is to put them in a Storage Queue, and have a worker process poll the queue at intervals and dump that data. Of course, I'll have to be careful about making sure the worker process does this frequently enough so that the queue doesn't infinitely back up. The max batch size of Azure Storage Queues is 32, but I'm thinking of potentially pulling in more than that: something like publishing to the data store every 1,000 readings or 30 seconds, whichever comes first.
Downward communication
The server sends down updates and notifications much less frequently. This is a slightly harder problem, as I can see two viable paradigms here (with some blending in between). Could either:
Create a Service Bus Queue for each device (or one queue with thousands of subscriptions - limit is for number of queues is 10,000)
Have a state table housed in a DB that contains the latest "state" of a specific message type that the devices will get sent to them
With option 1, the application server simply enqueues a message in a fire-and-forget manner. On the front-end servers, however, there's quite a bit of things that have to happen. Concerns I can see include:
Monitoring 10k queues (or many subscriptions off of a queue - the
Azure SDK apparently reuses connections for subscriptions to the same
queue)
Connection Management
Should no longer monitor a queue if device disconnects.
Need to expire messages if device is disconnected for an extended period of time (so that queue isn't backed up)
Need to enable some type of "refresh" mechanism to update device's complete state when it goes back online
The good news is that service bus queues are durable, and with sessions can arrange messages to come in a FIFO manner.
With option 2, the DB would house a table that would maintain state for all of the devices. This table would be checked periodically by the front-facing servers (every few seconds or so) for state changes written to it by the application server. The front-facing servers would then dispatch to the devices. This removes the requirement for queueing of FIFO, the reasoning being that this message contains the latest state, and doesn't have to compete with other messages destined for the same device. The message is ephemeral: if it fails, then it will be resent when the device reconnects and requests to be refreshed, or at the next check interval of the front-facing server.
In this scenario, the need for queues seems to be removed, but the DB becomes the bottleneck here, and I fear it's not as scalable.
These are both viable approaches, and I feel this question is already becoming too large (although I can provide more descriptions if necessary). Just wanted to get a feel for what's possible, what's usually done, if there's something fundamental I'm missing, and what things in the cloud can I take advantage of to not reinvent the wheel.
If you can identify the device (may be device id/IMEI/Mac address) by the the message it sends then you can reduce the number of queues from 10,000 to 1 queue and not have 10000 subscriptions too. This could also help you in the downward communication as you will be able to identify the device and send the message to the appropriate socket.
As you mentioned the connections last longer you could deliver the command to the device that is connected and decide what to do with the commands to the device that are not connected.
Hope it helps
I'm surely missing something about how the whole MQTT protocol works, as I can't grasp the usage pattern of Last Will Testament messages: what's their purpose?
One example I often see is about informing that a device has gone offline. It doesn't make very much sense to me, since it's obvious that if a device isn't publishing any data it may be offline or there could be some network problems.
So, what are some practical usages of the LWT? What was it invented for?
LWT messages are not really concerned about detecting whether a client has gone offline or not (that task is handled by keepAlive messages).
LWT messages are about what happens after the client has gone offline.
The analogy is that of a real last will:
If a person dies, she can formulate a testament, in which she declares what actions should be taken after she has passed away. An executor will heed those wishes and execute them on her behalf.
The analogy in the MQTT world is that a client can formulate a testament, in which it declares what message should be sent on it's behalf by the broker, after it has gone offline.
A fictitious example:
I have a sensor, which sends crucial data, but very infrequently.
It has formulated a last will statement in the form of [topic: '/node/gone-offline', message: ':id'], with :id being a unique id for the sensor. I also have a emergency-subscriber for the topic 'node/gone-offline', which will send a SMS to my phone every time a message is published on that channel.
During normal operation, the sensor will keep the connection to the MQTT-broker open by sending periodic keepAlive messages interspersed with the actual sensor readings. If the sensor goes offline, the connection to the broker will time out, due to the lack of keepAlives.
This is where LWT comes in: If no LWT is specified, the broker doesn't care and just closes the connection. In our case however, the broker will execute the sensor's last will and publish the LWT-message '/node/gone-offline: :id'. The message will then be consumed to my emergency-subscriber and I will be notified of the sensor's ID via SMS so that I can check up on what's going on.
In short:
Instead of just closing the connection after a client has gone offline, LWT messages can be leveraged to define a message to be published by the broker on behalf of the client, since the client is offline and cannot publish anymore.
Just because a device is not publishing does not mean it is not online or there is a network problem.
Take for example a sensor that monitors a value that only changes very infrequently, good design says that the sensor should only publish the changes to help reduce bandwidth usage as periodically publishing the same value is wasteful. If the value is published as a retained value then any new subscriber will always get the current value without having to wait for the sensor value to change and it publish again.
In this case the LWT is used to published when the sensor fails (or there is a network problem) so we know of the problem as soon at the client keep alive times out.
A in-depth article about Last-Will-and-Testament messages is available in the MQTT Essentials Blog Post series: http://www.hivemq.com/mqtt-essentials-part-9-last-will-and-testament/.
To summarize the blog post:
The Last Will and Testament feature is used in MQTT to notify other clients about an ungracefully disconnected client.
MQTT is often used in scenarios were unreliable networks are very common. Therefore it is assumed that some clients will disconnect ungracefully from time to time, because they lost the connection, the battery is empty or any other imaginable case. It would be good to know if a connected client has disconnected gracefully (which means with a MQTT DISCONNECT message) or not, in order to take appropriate action.
I have channels for push notification. Can I use this adresses for ping user's device? I want to know the count of online users.
The push notification channels could give you a rather rough count of devices that are reachable at a given instant, but it would potentially double-count the same user on multiple devices and it would be the number that receive the notification (roughly), not the number that are in your app at that time.
Keep in mind too that users could turn off notifications, and if you're surfacing toasts or tiles without perceptible value to the user, they're likely to get rather annoyed and potentially uninstall your app.
Analytics providers like Flurry and Localytics might be an option to provide finer granularity and better accuracy on user behavior. Or simply add some code into your own app to provide the level of tracking required; notifications seems like a rather backdoor means to this end.