For years, developers have written AJAX applications that at various time intervals request new data from the server to update the client's website with new content.
This model doesn't only affect performance on the server by having the server constantly answer HTTP requests, but also causes problems on the client's side, his application always being out of sync with the real data on the server side.
The php-long-polling library implements a reverse pattern for this technique, having the server send data to the client.
This way the server has a smaller load on it, data is sent out only when it's changed, and the client is truly kept up to date.
But as with any alternative solution, there's a downside too. For php-long-polling is the problem of always keeping a client-server connection open for data to be sent out when it changes. If too many clients are connected to the server, memory usage rises to very high levels and might cause problems for other processes.
Comments not found