Does someone have some experience with Pusher already? Connections seem to be the most critical limitation. As mentioned on pusher.com, a user that opens an application in two browser tabs at the same time counts as two connections. It would be interesting to know whether robots also count as connection (if yes, this could bring the free plan to the limit of 20 connections immediately).
P.S.: This post is not a statement against Pusher. I just try to understand how it works.
Probably, a connection only appears if a visitor becomes a user (log in) ..
To my knowledge only one connection per visitor is counted plus any server connections used for pushing. If the visitor uses multiple browsers or incognito mode it counts as well. Whether not-logged in users are counted as connection depends on the implementation, for flarum it's probably not the case.
I'm testing Pusher on my forum. I'll report back how it uses the connections.
I got 4 warnings during last 24 hours that my pusher account is reaching the limit of 20 connections. I guess $19 a month plan is the only option, but a touch expensive. It comes down to $228 a year. I'm looking forward to a local auto refresh system.
jacko you can set up a slanger instance which uses ruby. It's open source, but you'd need to do some work yourself to make it happen. Also flarum does not (yet) natively support configuring a different hostname for pusher, which would be a requirement.
Slanger is created on purpose as a drop-in replacement for pusher.
They should only count for different ips.