IM and Real-Time Messaging Acceleration
Move WebSocket and TCP connection termination to the edge closest to your users for social chat, team collaboration and live support — so messages stay instant on weak networks, across borders and at peak concurrency.
Get a messaging plan- 30msClient-to-edge latency
- 3,000+Global entry points
- 7T+DDoS mitigation capacity
Four problems that hurt messaging products most
What separates a chat product that feels instant from one that feels broken is rarely business logic — it is whether the long connection establishes, survives, and how expensive that cross-network hop is.
Weak networks drop connections, reconnects turn into storms
Sessions break as users move between cellular and Wi-Fi or ride an elevator. Heartbeats time out together, thousands of handshakes arrive in the same second, and the gateway saturates — often alongside duplicate deliveries and failed offline sync.
Cross-border round trips are slow
With entry servers in one region, overseas users traverse multiple international hops at two to three hundred milliseconds each way. "Typing…" arrives before the message, call setup stalls, and support conversations look unanswered.
Peak concurrency and group fan-out overload the gateway
A single message to a 10,000-member group becomes 10,000 deliveries. At the evening peak, connection count, egress bandwidth and memory hit their ceilings at once — and unlike HTTP, you cannot simply drain a node holding live sockets.
Attacks cut the connection, endpoints get abused
Once the gateway IP is public, SYN floods, ACK floods and connection-exhaustion attacks can drop every live socket within minutes, while scripted traffic hammers login, send-message and friend-request endpoints and floods the product with spam accounts.
Six core capabilities for IM workloads
Signalling, media and security run on one network. Long connections are transported, never parsed or rewritten, so your application protocol stays exactly as it is.
Edge connection termination
WebSocket and custom TCP sessions handshake and stay open on the nearest edge node, typically cutting client-to-entry RTT below 30ms so both first connect and reconnect get cheaper.
CN2 and backbone direct routes
From edge to message centre, traffic rides CN2 GIA lines, our private backbone and 300+ PNIs — avoiding public-internet detours and congested international egress, so round-trip time and jitter both settle.
Tunable keepalive, spread-out reconnects
Idle timeouts, heartbeat intervals and keepalive behaviour are configurable per workload, and multiple edge nodes answer the same hostname so a single failure never sends every client back at the same instant.
Media delivered from nearby
Split media from signalling: images, voice notes, clips and files upload to a local edge before reaching origin and download straight from edge cache, so repeated group downloads never hit your servers.
L4 scrubbing and gateway shielding
7T+ of mitigation capacity absorbs SYN floods, ACK floods and connection-exhaustion attacks at the edge. Your gateway IP stops being public and origin firewalls only allow our fetch ranges.
Endpoint risk control and anti-spam
Rate and behaviour rules on login, send, friend-request and upload endpoints catch bulk registration, credential stuffing and spam scripts, with custom policies that keep real users flowing.
Four steps to go live, no protocol changes
Onboarding touches the transport path only. Message formats, sequence numbers and ACK logic are untouched, and both canary and rollback are a single DNS change.
Review the setup
Confirm protocol, ports and heartbeat strategy, then map user geography and peak concurrency to choose entry regions and forwarding mode.
Configure policies
Set L4/L7 forwarding rules, TLS certificates, idle timeout and keepalive values, and route media hostnames through caching and upload acceleration.
Canary the traffic
Point a subset of clients or regions at the accelerated endpoint, compare connect success rate and message latency, then roll out fully.
Observe and tune
Keep tuning from live dashboards for connection count, connect success rate, heartbeat timeouts and p95 latency, with full traceability for security events.
Typical results after onboarding
Ranges observed across social, collaboration and customer-support customers; actual results depend on protocol design, heartbeat strategy and where your users are.
- 60%Lower cross-region round trip
- 99.9%Connection success rate
- 70%Fewer drops and heartbeat timeouts
- 99.99%Messaging channel availability
IM acceleration and long-connection FAQ
Yes. We carry WebSocket and custom TCP over layer-4 forwarding — the payload is never parsed or rewritten — and the session stays open on the edge node that completed the handshake. Idle timeout is configurable and defaults well above common heartbeat intervals, so clients that send keepalives on schedule are never reaped. If you use a long or custom heartbeat, tell us during onboarding and we will align the keepalive settings before the canary.
That is a classic reconnect storm, and it takes three layers. First, terminate at the edge so client RTT falls under 30ms and each handshake is far cheaper. Second, let several edge nodes answer the same hostname so failures spread naturally instead of funnelling into one gateway. Third, use exponential backoff with jitter on the client. Together these typically cut peak same-second reconnects by an order of magnitude.
Cross-border slowness comes from public-internet detours and congested international egress, not server speed. After onboarding, clients connect to a nearby edge and the edge reaches your message centre over CN2 GIA and our private backbone with 300+ PNI interconnects, removing hops and queueing delay while jitter settles at peak. The exact gain depends on origin placement and user mix, so we recommend a side-by-side test with your real client first.
Stop the traffic from reaching the gateway at all. After onboarding only our entry IPs are public, and 7T+ of scrubbing capacity handles SYN floods, ACK floods and connection-exhaustion attacks at the edge. Change the gateway IP as well and allow only our fetch ranges through the origin firewall, or the attacker will keep hitting the old address. Because connections spread across many edge nodes, one affected node no longer means every client reconnecting at once.
Yes, and we recommend separating media from signalling. Signalling rides the accelerated long connection while images, voice, clips and files go through the CDN: uploads land on a nearby edge before reaching origin, and downloads are served from edge cache. Popular files shared in a group commonly exceed a 90% hit ratio, cutting origin egress sharply. Cache lifetimes and signed-URL hotlink protection are configurable per path and file type.
Usually no code changes. Layer-4 forwarding only transports the stream — nothing is parsed, cached or reordered — so ordering and delivery guarantees remain the job of your application protocol (sequence numbers, ACKs, offline sync). Onboarding is a DNS change to the accelerated endpoint, and you can canary a slice of clients first, compare connect success rate and p95 message latency, then roll out. Rolling back is the same single change.
Still haven't found what you're looking for? Talk to our team.
Every message connects, stays connected, and arrives fast
Share your protocol, heartbeat strategy and user geography, and we will propose an entry, keepalive and protection configuration — plus a free head-to-head latency test.