Lightstreamer Broker

Is your product challenged by the complexities of delivering real-time data to users? Lightstreamer Broker is your go-to solution, seamlessly bridging the “last mile” with unparalleled reliability and scalability.

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Full power

Easily build any real-time application

Stream live data to your mobile, web, and desktop applications without worrying about the complexities of WebSockets, HTTP streaming, or network challenges like firewalls and disconnections—let us handle it for you.

Financial market data

Live dashboards

Online games

Live chats

Real-time collaboration

Data syncrhonization

What is Intelligent Streaming?

Lightstreamer’s Intelligent Streaming dynamically adjusts the data flow to match each user’s network conditions. In scenarios where receiving updates in real time is more critical than receiving every single update—such as online trading or live telemetry—Lightstreamer can resample and conflate data on the fly, ensuring all users remain in sync regardless of connection quality. This technology delivers real-time data to users on the move, effectively handling packet loss without the need for buffering, which can cause data delays. With Lightstreamer’s Intelligent Streaming, last-mile data delivery is seamlessly managed, giving you complete peace of mind.

On average, Adesso has 25,000-30,000 clients connected, and at peak times we serve up to 80,000-100,000 concurrent clients. In the German market, we manage 6 million financial instruments, providing push updates at a rate of 500,000 to 600,000 per second. During peak periods, Adesso’s infrastructure handles up to 2 million updates per second, with each quote being published to the Lightstreamer adapters, ready to be pushed to clients.

Roland Prosek

— Senior Manager, Adesso SE

Bridge your backend with Lightstreamer

Seamlessly integrate the Lightstreamer Broker with your back-end data sources, feeds, and event brokers, extending your Event-Driven Architecture (EDA) to the web. Choose from a range of Adapters and Connectors, or mix and match to suit your needs.

ADAPTERS

Build custom Lightstreamer Adapters using our SDKs and examples to create powerful, tailored solutions.

Java

Python

Node.js

.NET

TCP sockets

Data Adapters

Stream data from any real-time source directly into the Lightstreamer Broker for intelligent, efficient delivery to clients.

Metadata Adapters

Integrate with your authentication and authorization systems to manage fine-grained security for your applications.

CONNECTORS

Leverage pre-built Connectors that enable seamless integration with standard third-party event brokers—no coding required.

Kafka

MQTT

JMS

Kafka Connector

Connect Lightstreamer with any Kafka broker, including Apache Kafka, Confluent Cloud, Amazon MSK, Redpanda, and more. Learn more

MQTT Connector

Easily integrate with MQTT brokers like Eclipse Mosquitto, HiveMQ, VerneMQ, AWS IoT Core, and others. Learn more

JMS Connector

Connect to any JMS provider, such as IBM® MQ, ActiveMQ®, JBoss Messaging, RabbitMQ, and more. Learn more

Connect your frontend to Lightstreamer

Effortlessly integrate real-time functionality into your applications using Lightstreamer’s versatile client libraries. Whether you’re building a mobile, web, desktop, or smartwatch app, Lightstreamer enables seamless and efficient streaming of live data.

CLIENT API

Our client SDKs simplify the connection to the Lightstreamer Broker across a wide range of platforms, technologies, and programming languages. With a consistent set of features and abstractions, based on the Unified Client Model, our libraries provide everything you need to embed real-time data into any type of application.

Platforms

Web browsers

Android

Windows

Linux

Apple

Flutter

Unity

Languages

JavaScript

Swift

Kotlin

Java

Python

Node.js

.NET

C++

WebSockets

Seamless connectivity & real-time communication

StreamSense & firewall traversal

Lightstreamer’s StreamSense algorithm intelligently and automatically selects the optimal transport protocol for each client, whether it’s WebSockets or various types of HTTP connections. This ensures seamless data delivery, even through the most restrictive corporate firewalls and legacy proxies, guaranteeing that live data always reaches your users.

Automatic reconnections

For users on the move, disconnections can frequently occur due to network switches, signal drops, or temporary internet outages. Lightstreamer handles these interruptions seamlessly, automatically reconnecting to the server and resynchronizing data without user intervention. This ensures that your users experience uninterrupted real-time updates, even in the most challenging network conditions.

In-app notifications

With in-app notifications (also known as in-app messaging), Lightstreamer streams data directly to client applications, ensuring high throughput, low latency, and guaranteed delivery. This enables real-time updates within your app, keeping users informed and engaged instantly, without the need for external polling or delayed refreshes.

Push notifications

Beyond the streaming channel, Lightstreamer enables Web browsers, Android devices, and Apple devices to receive messages through native push notifications via Google FCM and Apple APN. This ensures that your mobile and web apps, even when not running, can still receive real-time messages, keeping your users informed and connected at all times.

Asymmetric Pub/Sub

Lightstreamer’s “asymmetric publish/subscribe” paradigm is optimized for scenarios where massive data publishing occurs from server-side feeds, which are typically entirely separate from data consumers in terms of topology, protocol, and business model. This approach ensures efficient and scalable data distribution in complex environments with decoupled data sources and consumers.

Bidirectional messaging

Lightstreamer facilitates not only server-to-client communication but also client-to-server messaging. Messages sent from the client are guaranteed to be delivered in order, with automatic batching to optimize efficiency. This ensures reliable, low-latency delivery through features like explicit acks, retransmissions, reordering, and heartbeats.

Fine-grained subscriptions

Lightstreamer allows clients to subscribe to specific “items” and select only the “fields” they need, such as the “last price” and “time” of a stock quote. This fine-grained approach ensures efficient data delivery, as server-side Data Adapters operate on a “publish on demand” basis, sending updates only when there is an active subscriber. Minimizing data transmission optimizes both performance and resource usage.

Request-response

Beyond the publish/subscribe paradigm, Lightstreamer also supports request/response interactions. Clients can send a request to the server and receive a response generated by your server-side Metadata Adapter. This capability adds flexibility, allowing for direct communication and quick data retrieval alongside real-time streaming.

Advanced data management & delivery

Fan-out and multiplexing

Lightstreamer ensures that every event is published once by the Data Adapter, then efficiently distributed to all subscribers through scalable fan-out. The Lightstreamer Broker multiplexes multiple events over the same connection, allowing seamless delivery of both individual messages and broad message broadcasts to different clients.

Bandwidth & frequency management

Lightstreamer lets you set maximum update frequencies for each subscribed item and allocate specific bandwidth per client. For example, limit a user to 2 updates per second for a particular item, or cap bandwidth at 10 kbps for one user while allowing 200 kbps for another. This ensures differentiated service levels and predictable control over your outbound Internet bandwidth.

Smart throttling

Lightstreamer automatically detects network congestion and available bandwidth for each client, then adjusts the data flow to match the network capacity. This ensures that even clients on unreliable mobile networks receive real-time data. When throttling occurs, data is resampled on the fly to prevent aging, maintaining the integrity of real-time updates.

Delta delivery & data conflation

Lightstreamer optimizes data transmission by sending only the changed fields for subsequent updates (item-level delta). You can also enable field-level deltas, supporting Diff and JSON Patch algorithms. With data conflation, multiple updates are merged into a single transmission, reflecting the latest value for each field.

Data snapshots

Lightstreamer ensures a smooth start for client applications by delivering an initial snapshot of each subscribed item before streaming real-time events. These snapshots help bootstrap the user interface, providing the latest state immediately. Snapshots are automatically cached and updated by the Lightstreamer Broker, ensuring efficient and reliable data initialization.

Selectors & customizers

Lightstreamer allows you to fine-tune data delivery with selectors and customizers. Selectors let you evaluate a custom server-side function for each message, deciding whether to send or discard it. Customizers enable dynamic transformations of message values before they reach the client. These mechanisms allow different users to subscribe to the same item while receiving personalized views.

Multiple subscription modes

Lightstreamer offers various subscription modes to optimize data delivery based on your needs. Merge mode allows for data conflation, Distinct mode is ideal for event lists, and Command mode manages table synchronization with add, update, and delete commands, saving up to 98% in bandwidth. For unfiltered data streams, Raw mode delivers messages exactly as they are.

Scalable, secure, & cloud-ready architecture

Cloud-native

Lightstreamer is designed for cloud-native environments but also offers the flexibility to be deployed on-premises. It fully supports modern DevOps and deployment tools like Docker and Kubernetes, enabling seamless scalability and management whether you’re running in the cloud or within your own data centers.

Massive scalability

The Lightstreamer Broker is engineered for massive scalability, leveraging a staged event-driven architecture with asynchronous I/O and dynamic thread pools. Capable of scaling both vertically and horizontally, it efficiently serves millions of concurrent clients while maintaining low message latency.

Ultra-low latency

Lightstreamer is optimized for delivering real-time data with exceptionally low latency, processing updates within the broker in just single-digit milliseconds. This ensures that your users receive data almost instantly, making it ideal for time-sensitive applications where every millisecond counts.

TCP optimization

Lightstreamer optimizes TCP communication by efficiently aggregating data within packets, offering configurable options to balance between latency and overhead reduction. The adaptive TCP send buffer quickly detects packet loss without sacrificing throughput, while the lightweight wire protocol minimizes overhead and redundancy, ensuring fast and efficient data transmission.

Backpressure

Lightstreamer’s backpressure mechanism safeguards the broker from sudden surges in connections and subscriptions. Highly configurable and adaptable, backpressure is essential in managing scenarios with massive connection spikes or reconnections, ensuring stable performance even under extreme load conditions.

Security & encryption

Lightstreamer ensures robust security with strong TLS encryption, protecting data in transit with configurable cipher suites tailored to your needs. Both server-side and client-side certificates are supported, enabling mutual authentication and secure connections. This comprehensive approach guarantees that your real-time data remains private and secure, meeting the highest industry standards.

Advanced authentication & authorization

Lightstreamer enables fine-grained security through the Metadata Adapter, allowing custom authentication and authorization. It validates client credentials, including HTTP headers and certificates, by integrating with your back-end systems. Every client subscription and QoS request is authorized via the Metadata Adapter, ensuring flexible and robust security.

Comprehensive monitoring

Lightstreamer offers robust monitoring tools, including a web-based dashboard that provides real-time metrics on server performance and status. Fine-grained logging is fully configurable, with multiple categories and levels. Extensive metrics are also exposed via a JMX interface, with ready-made integration for Prometheus and Grafana, ensuring seamless application management and monitoring.

Lightstreamer really deserves its name and turned out to be Piriform’s best choice for delivering small pieces of information. Communication is highly secure and a single server instance can handle thousands of simultaneous connections.

Rafal Girycki

— Lead Software Engineer, Avast

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