Comment by tracker1

Unless I'm completely misunderstanding, once you "upgrade" the connection to a websocket connection, it's pretty much a bog standard TLS socket... I'm not sure what you mean by a size explosion, compared to what? As to latency or overhead, yeah there's some, but generally very minimal on anything resembling modern hardware, there are literally trillions of bytes transported over HTTPS/TLS every day from watches to super computers.

Beyond this, there are libraries and tunnels for everything under the sun, and it's one of the least likely options to see mass breakages in general given it handshakes over 443 (https). Assuming you want encryption... if you don't then use raw sockets, or websockets without https and/or raw sockets... You can use whatever you like.