Reply To: Chat plugin?
Guys I have cometchat installed on a current wordpress site and I’ve had to deactivate it after much back and forth with their support team (who are very good it has to be said).
I bought the Professional Edition and also purchased the Comet Service to reduce load on my server.
Sadly it hasn’t worked out well.
Every time cometchat gets even slightly busy (30+ chatters in a room) it brings down my entire website. I disabled comet service and tried running it solely on my own dedicated server (which is pretty powerful 12 core / 64GB ram / 1Gbps pipe + 1Gbps burst) but the same issue kept happening.
After some debugging it all boils down to the fact that, whether you have comet service activated or not, the script “calls home” to comet’s servers every time somebody loads it in their browser. The problem that was taking my site out is that their servers couldn’t handle the load and were returning 504 errors which was wiping my site out (as the comet chat scripts are loaded aright after the opening <head> tag, preventing the rest of the site from loading).
They tried a few things to fix it for me, but ultimately the script still needs to contact their servers and their servers can’t handle the requests.
It’s a shame because it is a really good script and when working, works flawlessly. The integration with WP is brilliant, although, as mentioned above, any messaging done via comet chat stays in comet chat and can’t be translated elsewhere on your site.
There is this WP chat plug in that I’ve had to revert back to (had it prior to buying comet chat) but it’s a bit clunky and is a bit of a resource pig – https://wordpress.org/plugins/quick-chat/
It does work though. Hope that helps 😉
