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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-20T11:28:42+00:00

I need to add a real-time element to my web application. Basically, I need

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I need to add a “real-time” element to my web application. Basically, I need to detect “changes” which are stored in a SQL Server table, and update various parts of the UI when a change has occured.

I’m currently doing this by polling. I send an ajax request to the server every 3 seconds asking for any new changes – these are then returned and processed. It works, but I don’t like it – it means that for each browser I’ll be issuing these requests frequently, and the server will always be busy processing them. In short, it doesn’t scale well.

Is there any clever alternative that avoids polling overhead?

Edit

In the interests of completeness, I’m updating this to mention the solution we eventually went with – SignalR. It’s OS and comes from Microsoft. It’s risen in popularity, and I can heartily recommend this, or indeed WebSync which we also looked at.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Check out WebSync, a comet server designed for ASP.NET/IIS.

    In particular, what I would do is use the SQL Dependency class, and when you detect a change, use RequestHandler.Publish(“/channel”, data); to send out the info to the appropriate listening clients.

    Should work pretty nicely.

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