Realtime stats

[pospi]

Socket server has been implemented to send realtime events to viewers of the site.

Finalisation tasks:

• Update webserver to hold aggregate stats in memory and send absolute numbers back to clients (rather than individual increment events)
• Hook events up in the frontend:
  • View, Call & Email global counters to update via logging endpoint
  • Tweets & FB / G+ share global counters to update from stats server polling. Need to implement this behaviour on the API server and proxy requests to the stats endpoint so we can update it more frequently, if possible?
  • Views, calls, emails & tweets to legislators to alert viewers in the "how am I represented?" results
  • Same legislator-specific events to update the map as they occur
  • Fire view event with electorate ID when visitor locates themselves. No need to log but should be broadcast to all to show visits by electorate on the map.
• Throttle client updates to every few seconds or so to avoid saturating the network with unnecessary events
• Also send events for twitter mentions and stream those into the supporters list in realtime
• Will probably also need to check and ensure high server socket connection limits etc

[pospi]

• Also consider using RedisStore and scaling webserver over multiple nodes / CPUs http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9267292/examples-in-using-redisstore-in-socket-io/9275798#9275798

actually pretty easy to setup- https://github.com/techpines/express.io/tree/master/examples/scaling-with-redis

[pospi]

Will probably leave tweets until after launch, not a huge priority. @thomasdavis is on infrastructure now (: