Re-sort Chat History when Socket Messages Received

[hoffmabc]

When chat messages are received via websocket they are appended as they come in but not sorted properly many times. We should dynamically re-sort the history to ensure they're always shown to the user in chronological order.

See an example:

[rmisio]

We could do this, but ideally the server fixes things where those messages don't come out of order, because it's less than ideal for a new chat message to come and potentially be displayed above the fold - the user might miss such messages.

[hoffmabc]

I think we are stuck in a catch-22 here. I am trying to understand the dilemma though. If a new message comes in and is replaced way higher there will still be a new message indicator right?

[rmisio]

If a new message comes in and is replaced way higher there will still be a new message indicator right?

If you're not actively chatting with them, yes. If you are actively chatting with them, there are no notifications or indicators (which is, I believe, the standard behavior of chat apps, because otherwise in a busy active convo, you'd be flooded with indicators).

Is it really not possible for the server to address this? I'm not aware of any chat app where real-time messages come out of sequence.

[hoffmabc]

If messages come in out of order and the server is able to detect that, how should it handle it? Wait indefinitely for the right one to come in first?

[rmisio]

I don't know. Why are messages coming in out of order? Is that just something beyond our control?

[hoffmabc]

Well I assume this is why we have this problem to begin with. I’m not sure exactly why or how we’d prevent it. @cpacia?

[rmisio]

One related thing I noticed recently was that the chat message POST is sometimes taking several seconds to complete (e.g. I noticed some around 10 seconds). It's inconsistent. I'm wondering if the issue might be that a user is sending multiple messages in a short time frame and earlier ones might be taking a while to complete and later ones are going through quicker.

Not sure if something changed on the backend because when I was developing chat, chat messages would post almost instantly.

Maybe the server has to manage some type of queue of messages?

(either way, things start to get complex somewhere)