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Ajax?


Michdd

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Hm.. I was always under the impression that AJAX was pretty slow. Even if it's faster how is it possible to create something 'live' without being extremely inefficient? Isn't AJAX just low-level http requests? Wouldn't you have to run an Ajax request every few seconds to query the server to see if there are any updates? Or is there another way that I'm just completely oblivious to?

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what about facebook chat? - Same idea. The webpage makes an ajax request every few seconds. If you have enough dedicated servers its not an issue. Remember, Meebo doesn't have to query its OWN servers. it queries the servers by AIM, Yahoo! chat, myspace, etc. to see if any new messages were posted.

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I find it shocking that meebo / facebook use blind http requests.. Especially with the amount of processing that needs to be done in certain instances, having this called every 1-2 seconds by every client seems overwhelmingly inefficient..

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I guess I have another question about systems like these, it's probably pretty obvious but I'm just not sure. Would systems like these pass information through an AJAX request then the script that it queries relays information to a socket server? Is it something like that?

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what about facebook chat? - Same idea. The webpage makes an ajax request every few seconds. If you have enough dedicated servers its not an issue.

 

If you had something huge like Facebook going on.  You probably would quite a few dedicated boxes just for the chat. Multiple 1,000,000 users sending http request via ajax every 2 seconds, you will be going like 500,000 requests per second.  That would quickly become unwieldy. It would cost a lot of $ to have that feature.

(My opinion)

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Yes, it would require a lot of dedicated servers, but facebook already had the resources, even before it launched its chat feature. And I'm sure the effort was well worth too.

 

Firing an ajax request every few seconds seems necessary. This is really the only way the server can track if a person is online. Most people don't bother logging off; they simply click the "x" on their browser.

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