I have a question about how to load balance web sockets.

I have a server which supports web sockets. Browsers connect to my site and each one opens a web socket to www.mydomain.com. That way, my social network app can push messages to the clients.

Traditionally, using just HTTP requests, I would scale up by adding a second server and a load balancer in front of the two web servers.

With web sockets, the connection has to be directly with the web server, not the load balancers, because if a machine has a physical limit of say 64k open ports, and the clients were connecting to the load balancer, then I couldn't support more than 64k concurrent users.

So how do I -

1. get the client to connect directly to the web server (rather than the load balancer) when the page loads? Do I simply load the JavaScript from a node, and the load balancers (or whatever) randomly modifies the URL for the script, every time the page is initially requested?

2. handle a ripple start? The browser will notice that the connection is closed as the web server shuts down. I can write JavaScript code to attempt to reopen the connection, but the node will be gone for a while. So I guess I would have to go back to the load balancer to query the address of the next node to use?

3. I did wonder about the load balancers sending a redirect on the initial request, so that the browser initially requests www.mydomain.com and gets redirected to www34.mydomain.com. That works quite well, until the node goes down - and sites like Facebook don't do that. How do they do it?