I am building a website on a free website provider (000webhost) and I am currently working on a chat. I have set an interval every 500ms which reads a file and checks if a new message was posted. If there is a new one, i load all messages from a .txt-file into a element in html.
It is nearly finished but after long chatting or just being on the chat-page (3 minutes or more), my site crashes and I have to wait about an hour till i can access it. I am refreshing the chat using javascript and ajax every half second.
Does anybody know what I could have done wrong?
I already searched google for that issue but couldn’t find any help.
Edit:
I changed the interval for refreshing the chat to 2,5 seconds and the website didn’t crash. I think that solved the problem..
Sounds like the host is blocking you, maybe due to excessive requests. One request every 500 milliseconds from the same IP can probably be mistaken for a DOS-attack or similar.
There are more performant and suitable ways to build a chat – have a look at web sockets or node.js for instance.
Update
As Tom points out in his comment, it might be that a free web host doesn’t provide or allow you to setup a Node-server. In that case, I guess you could experiment with an increased request-interval, and see if that helps you, or check with the host if they have such a limit. An increased request interval would probably make the chat feel less responsive, but it is tough to get everything on a free host.