WebSockets change your operational model
Every client reconnects at once. That is what a deploy means now on one project of mine, since Reverb made WebSockets a first-party Laravel feature this spring and order updates go to the browser instead of polling. The code was the easy part. A classic PHP app is stateless between requests. An FPM worker takes a request, answers, forgets. Capacity planning is requests per second. A WebSocket server is the opposite animal: thousands of open connections that mostly do nothing, but each one holds memory and a file descriptor, and each one is state that dies with the process. Your quiet realtime feature has a thundering herd built in. Plan for reconnect storms, raise descriptor limits, and make the client reconnect with jitter, never on a fixed timer. ...