Socket.IO vs WebRTC — What I Learned the Hard Way

We made a classic architectural mistake building a video calling feature. It worked perfectly in local testing. It fell apart in production. Here's exactly what happened, how we debugged it, and what we should have done from the start. The Setup I was building EyeSmarty — a remote team monitoring app with live audio/video calling between managers and team members. The stack was Vue.js + Electron on the frontend, Node.js + Express on the backend, and Socket.IO already handling all real-time events across the app. When the requirement came in for audio/video calling, the decision seemed obvious: "We already have Socket.IO for real-time things. Let's use it for calls too." That decision cost us weeks. How We Built It (The Wrong Way) The initial implementation was straightforward: Capture audio/video from the browser using getUserMedia Encode the media into chunks Send each chunk to the server via Socket.IO Server receives the chunk and emits it to the other participant Other participant r