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Asked: 2026-05-31T04:53:26+00:00

I did comprehensive Google research but I cannot find any good solution, so any

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I did comprehensive Google research but I cannot find any good solution, so any help (or just showing direction of next research) would by REALLY appreciated!

What I need is simple in idea, but looks like hard to implement:

I have data (say just picture) I want to show to all (even anonymous) users of website in the very same time. This data should change regularly (say once in 5 minutes), so the browsers of all users must refresh in given time.

The woflow is simple:

  • User will open page with countdown (which will show of course different time for each user depends of when the user has had connected).

  • At the end of countdown shall all browsers of connected users refresh to see new content.

  • The refresh should be ideally invoked by server to prevent prematured refresh when data doesn’t changed yet.

I was thinking of “refresh” meta tag, but it is problematic for SEO and it rely on user computer’s clock.

It can be done by javascript, but in that moment I rely on user computer’s clock.

I have hearded it is possible “push” data from server to browser using e.g. Perl, it is correct (is there somewhere some example)?

And in which scripting language would you write script which would “tick”. I cannot see way in PHP I am familiar with (use cron to execute counting script every minute looks really ugly)…

Thank you!

Michal

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    It’s not possible to push data from a web server to a web brower, given the request-response architecture of HTTP. It is, however, possible to poll the webserver using JavaScript and window.setInterval(); combined with AJAX.

    If not using local system time is an issue, why not respond to periodic AJAX requests with the number of microseconds until the next reload of data should commence? I would suggest you use AJAX for all of this instead of refreshing the browser with META REFRESH, or window.location.

    The server-side code could be anything really, you simply need a page that will return the number of microseconds until the next schedule refresh (And perhaps an error if no refresh is scheduled yet, telling the client JavaScript to poll again in a few seconds).

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