Case Study: Codeship achieves reduced API load and faster Shipscope updates with Pusher WebSockets

Improving Shipscope Performance with WebSockets

Codeship’s engineering team built Shipscope, a Chrome extension that polled the Codeship API every 10 seconds for build status, which increased API load and wasted browser CPU with mostly redundant requests. To solve this they turned to Pusher, using Pusher’s WebSocket service and JavaScript client (private channels, authEndpoint and encrypted option)—technology they already used for realtime updates in their web UI.

Using Pusher, Shipscope subscribes to private project channels and binds update events; on each event the extension fetches full build details securely over HTTPS. This removed constant polling so the API server and user browsers only act “when something interesting has happened,” delivering immediate build notifications, lower API request volume and reduced client CPU, plus offline detection via Pusher’s connection state events. Pusher made the WebSocket integration simple to implement.

Codeship

David McGaffin

Senior Engineer