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100k clients at ONCE

ยท One min read
The Rage Team
The Rage Team

Wrote a post exploring how Rage handles Basecamp's official Pi benchmark for ONCE Campfire - the same benchmark their Rust port uses to demonstrate 100k concurrent WebSocket clients.

The key results running on a Pi-class EC2 instance:

  • 10x the clients the Rails reference handled
  • ~22x the deliveries per second (187k vs 8.7k)
  • ~4x less memory per connection (64 KiB vs 245 KiB)

The article covers the migration process (1 hour with AI agents), the benchmark methodology, detailed results comparing Rails, Rage with Active Record, and Rage with Sequel, and why the Rust version's additional efficiency may not matter in realistic scenarios.

100k clients at ONCE: the Campfire rewrite, in Ruby