Question

I implemented heartbeat as the following

$.ajax({
    cache:false,
    timeout:8000,  
    type:"POST",
    url:"someurl.php",
    data:allFormValues,
    error:function(){ alert("some error occurred") },
    success:function(response){ //call some functions  }
   });

and in the server side

$time = time();
        while(!proccessServer() && (time() - $time) < 60 )
        {
            sleep(5);
        }

and simply it call a function if it returns false the loop will sleep for more 5 seconds and then check
but the problem is this thing is eating my resources CPU
and this was only when 5 users testing it

I used before this

window.setInterval(function(){
  //I call a function here 
}, 5000);

but also it was eating the resources because of many requests

and maybe my app have 100K online at the same time
also I am not thinking about using websockets because of browsers compatibility
What do you suggest to solve this ?
any help is appreciated

Answer 1

Your web server (Apache?) will use one thread until the request completes, which eats resources. AND you are using a PHP process for each visitor, just waiting. PHP is not very suitable for such solutions. You should look at other technologies if you want to do Comet. For example node.js.

You could also switch to NGiNX as web server, and use NGiNX_HTTP_Push_Module from http://pushmodule.slact.net/ for you application, and then stay with PHP. NGiNX will then accept the connection from your visitor and then wait for your code to push data to NGiNX. It might work for you, depending on what exactly you want to do.