I am trying to create an application for polling different sensors. I want to make this polling efficient so that I don’t poll a slow changing sensor very frequently. On the other hand there may be some sensors like temp sensor whose values keep on changing frequently.
I found an analogy in twitter. When a twitter stream is open how does it automatically give real time notifications of new tweets? . They must be polling a web server of tweet. Right? How this polling rate is decided. There must be some algorithms or may be I am missing proper term/keyword for this thing to Google it. This must have got something to do with push and pull based architectures. Right?
For getting accurate sensor waveforms, search for Nyquist rate, e.g., this Wikipedia page
If you are going to be filtering your sensor streams, it is best to sample at a fixed frequency to make the filter math easier.