Fastest XMPP Sessions with HTTP Pre-Binding

December 14, 2009

XMPP session establishment is normally quite fast over native sockets, but over BOSH, the round-trip latency of several request and response pairs can be quite high. Among its other benefits, session attachment provides a great solution to this problem.

I first heard of this technique for rapid session bootstrapping, called pre-binding, bootstrapping from Andy Skelton. Andy had written a module for im.wordpress.com that in a single HTTP request created and provided the credentials Strophe needs to attach to an existing session. This session was already authenticated, meaning that the first request Strophe sends can be a real, application-level request.

:EXTENDED:

For example, a normal BOSH session must connect and authenticate to an XMPP server. This typically takes about 4 to 5 stanzas, each of which must wait for a response before proceeding. Assuming a 100 millisecond round-trip time, this is about half a second of latency. While not much, this is directly perceptible to users. A pre-bound requests however, involves only one round-trip, turning half a second into a small 100 milliseconds.

Andy has kindly made his http_prebind module available on his GitHub account, if you’d like to try it out.

Collecta uses this same technique, however we use it with anonymous sessions. Any BOSH client can connect to http://collecta.com/http-pre-bind and instantly receive credentials for an anonymous session to guest.collecta.com. This makes our own client’s start-up time near instantaneous. In fact, we’ve gone even further by having the web application server make this request before the HTML is returned and embed the credentials into the page; an anonymous session is ready and waiting as soon as the JavaScript code starts executing.

Today, we’ve made our own Mod-Http-Pre-Bind code available, and I’ve written a small example for using this with Strophe.js. I’ll go over the salient parts of this example in the rest of this post.

Instead of connecting normally, an AJAX request is made to the pre-bind service. I’ve used jQuery for the code below, but any AJAX library will work just as well:

// attempt prebind
$.ajax({
    type: 'POST',
    url: PREBIND_SERVICE,
    contentType: 'text/xml',
    processData: false,
    data: $build('body', {
        to: Strophe.getDomainFromJid($('#jid').val()),
        rid: '' + Math.floor(Math.random() * 4294967295),
        wait: '60',
        hold: '1'}).toString(),
    dataType: 'xml',
    error: normal_connect,
    success: attach});

</code>

The code sends an HTTP POST request containing a BOSH-like <body/> element with the initial RID, the domain to connect to, and the hold and wait values.

The pre-bind service will return a <body/> tag in its response like the one shown here:

<body xmlns='http://jabber.org/protocol/httpbind' 
      sid='892efca20cea238958f0603f89a6f8472ef790fe' 
      rid='2219367495'>
  <iq xmlns='jabber:client'
      id='_bind_auth_2'
      type='result'>
    <bind xmlns='urn:ietf:params:xml:ns:xmpp-bind'>
      <jid>22720631691260831658412599@guest.collecta.com/37436661951260831658614586</jid>
    </bind>
  </iq>
</body>

</code>

You can simply extract the JID, SID, and RID values straight out of this response, and use them to call attach():

function attach(data) {
    log('Prebind succeeded. Attaching...');

    connection = new Strophe.Connection(BOSH_SERVICE);
    connection.rawInput = rawInput;
    connection.rawOutput = rawOutput;
    
    var $body = $(data.documentElement);
    connection.attach($body.find('jid').text(), 
                      $body.attr('sid'), 
                      parseInt($body.attr('rid'), 10) + 1, 
                      onConnect);
}

</code>

Now you have an established, anonymous session to the server, ready for immediate use.

It just doesn’t get much easier or faster than that!

There’s a whole chapter of my book on the topic of session attachment and its various uses. It’s starting to become an important technique for XMPP web applications.

Fastest XMPP Sessions with HTTP Pre-Binding - December 14, 2009 - Jack Moffitt