Chat Room Idea

[DragonFire-N[R]]

I've been trying to think of the best way to build a PHP based chat room. Obviously a push method would work the greatest but I have been unable to find any such techniques using PHP so this is the only alternative I can think of.

 

When a user logs in to the chat, a file is created in a secure directory on the server for the user. This file will store messages to be sent to the user. Each time someone sends a message to the chat, the message is inserted into every user's file. Then, using AJAX, the user in chat will "reload" the chat every few seconds, which will simply access a PHP script that reads the file, sends it to the user, then truncates the file contents to zero.

 

My concern is obviously the high frequency of server loads to access the chat file, but this is why I would try to minimize the server's effort for retrieving chat content and focus the efforts more on sending messages since this action is done less often.

 

I'm looking for suggestions on what would be best to keep the system efficient... maybe some ideas of headers to send which may help with optimization. Thank you for your time.