Twitch chat bot missing messages during high traffic - is this a Python socket issue?

[ryanl]

I’m working on a Python 3 IRC bot for Twitch and running into problems when the chat gets busy. When there are lots of messages coming in really fast, my bot only catches some of them. I tested this by sending 10 messages within one second and my bot only received about 6 of them.

I’m not sure if this is just how Python sockets work or if there’s something wrong with my code. Here’s how I’m handling the connection and message receiving:

# Bot initialization
def __init__(self, config):
    self.connection = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM)

# Connection setup
def establish_connection(self):
    self.connection.connect(("irc.twitch.tv", 6667))
    self.connection.send(("PASS %s\r\n" % self.token).encode("utf-8"))
    self.connection.send(("NICK %s\r\n" % self.bot_name).encode("utf-8"))
    self.connection.send("TWITCHCLIENT 2\r\n".encode("utf-8"))
    self.connection.send(("JOIN #%s\r\n" % self.target_channel).encode("utf-8"))

# Message handling
def get_messages(self):
    incoming_data = self.connection.recv(4096)
    incoming_data = incoming_data.decode("utf-8")
    if 'PING' in incoming_data:
        self.connection.send(incoming_data.replace('PONG', 'PING').encode("utf-8"))
    return incoming_data

Is there a better way to handle this so I don’t lose messages when the chat is active?

[DancingFox]

You’ve hit the classic socket buffering issue that gets every IRC bot developer. This isn’t a Python thing - it’s how you’re handling the data stream. When chat gets busy, messages come in faster than your single recv() can handle, and you lose some in the buffer overflow.

I ran into this exact problem building my first Twitch bot three years ago. Fix it with a proper message queue. Don’t process messages right after recv() - dump them into a deque or similar structure, then process in batches. Stops the socket buffer from overflowing when traffic spikes.

Also crucial - switch your socket to non-blocking mode and add timeout handling. Your current blocking setup will hang the bot if Twitch’s IRC server delays responses. Look into select() or poll() for better I/O multiplexing if you’re monitoring multiple channels.

[Harry47]

This is super common with IRC connections and high-frequency streams. Your approach has a major flaw - you’re calling recv() once per message cycle, but TCP doesn’t guarantee each recv() will contain exactly one complete message. Multiple IRC messages get bundled together in one recv() call, or messages get split across multiple calls. You need proper message buffering and parsing. Keep a buffer that accumulates incoming data, then split it by newlines to extract individual messages. Also bump your buffer size past 4096 bytes for busy channels. Most successful Twitch bots use 8192 or 16384 byte buffers. Process all complete messages in your buffer before the next recv() call, or you’ll miss messages during peak traffic.

[Mike71]

totally! when you call recv(), it might not get a full message each time. try looping recv until you reach the \r\n for full messages. also, adding a timeout can help prevent your bot from freezing up if something goes wrong.