Bot makers: what is more stable? One IRC client per user of the bot or one big IRC client?

Chat and IRC
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I’m relatively new to developing twitch bots but I have a stable bot that I’m beginning to re-architect now that I’ve seen some of the limitations of my current code. It’s a hosted bot and at peak times I only have ~50 users using it.

My current design has a single IRC client per channel my bot joins and I’m curious if anyone has experience doing it this way vs one IRC client serving up multiple channels simultaneously. I don’t know if one may tend to be more stable long-term or not; obviously if my bot somehow got thousands of users one IRC client per user would be bad, but at a scale of only around 50 people does it really matter which approach I choose?

For reference, my bot is incredibly specialized so I doubt I’ll see its peak use grow that much. It’s a bot that tracks a Destiny game mode (Trials of Osiris).

Any thoughts on the matter would be appreciated. For the huge hosted bots (moo, night, etc) I have to assume they have one IRC client performing IRC duties for their users (or a farm of machines each serving up a set of users).

Another question: are rate limits per connection to the IRC chat, or are they per twitch account you’ve connected to the chat with? For example, if I connect to 50 different rooms with my bot account, each using a separate IRC client, am I rate limited across all 50 or is each one separate?

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The large bots spread channels over multiple connections. It’s not one channel per connection, it’s more along the lines of 20-50 channels per connection.

A single channel per connection is not viable for huge bots. Each outgoing connection takes up a port and it’s a huge waste of resources, since the vast majority of the channels will be dead silent as well.

Everything on a single connection is bad, because if the connection drops, you need to join all those thousands, even tens of thousands of channels again, and that will take hours, possibly over a day.

So what you’re left with is a hybrid. You don’t spend a huge amount of resources and, if a connection drops, you’re not spending an eternity getting back up again. The downside? The code gets complicated.

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Thanks. That’s pretty much what I figured and is the route I’ve drawn on my whiteboard. It’s also not something I’m looking forward to doing, so I may just keep 1 channel per connection until last :slight_smile:

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