Question

I have a Live Feed jQuery box which updates in every 10 seconds, and puts the sites latest comments on top. This is working fine: jQuery makes an Ajax request, calls a PHP, which returns new items or none.

This box is like a sidebar, it is on every page on my site. My problem is that if a user opens many pages on the site, every tab he opened will do this auto-refresh until he closes that tab. So with a few dozen users each opening many pages this becomes a problem, even if the Live Feed is well optimized, and the SQL query behind it is fast (0.0005 seconds per query). Also if the user leaves the browser open with a couple of opened tabs, and start browsing somewhere else, or watch a movie they’ll update forever, or until he closes them.

So what is a nice solution for this? Can I make my feed update only if its tab/window is visible/active? Is there an event which will fire if it was inactive and now active again?

Answer 1

Try adding onFocus event on the window object to trigger your updates and add onBlur to stop updating your live feeds.

Since you are using jquery you can do this

$(window).('focus',function(){
  //do updates
})

$(window).('blur',function(){
  //stop updates
})