When using Node.JS Cluster with socket.IO, the process of assigning traffic to a particular worker involves the following steps:
- A client connects to the socket.IO server.
- The socket.IO server broadcasts the connection to all worker processes.
- Each worker process receives the connection request.
- One of the worker processes is selected to handle the connection request based on a load balancing algorithm.
- The selected worker process creates a new socket connection to the client and assigns the connection ID to the client.
- All subsequent messages from the client are sent to the same worker process based on the connection ID.
- The selected worker process handles the messages and emits events to other worker processes if necessary.
This process ensures that each worker process handles only a portion of the overall traffic, thus improving the performance and scalability of the socket.IO server.