I’m trying to get an idea of how many clients a single web app would be able to handle when doing something like a chat client that pushes messages out to the clients.
I’d guess the right answer is it depends. I wouldn’t be surprised if you could handle 50-100 without too much effort.
I think that number will vary quite a bit though depending on how active those clients are and how many are in the same chat room if that’s the style of chat you’re talking about.
You could probably handle more than 100 if these are 1-1 chats matching two clients together.
And, if you really wanted something massive, I’m sure you could use load balancing techniques and a back end database to support a huge number of clients into the 1000s.
Not sure if that helps at all, but maybe if you only need 20-30 you might feel some encouragement. 