Question

I want to create a bidding system where user can see the current price of items. And if any other user on any other location place a bid before me it should auto update bid in my browser.

I have read about autoupdate JS+Ajax functions but even if I place a 5 second timer to auto update the content on user’s browser will it not put some extra load on server by making an ajax call every 5 second? Its a bidding system so user will have bids updating within 1-2 seconds so if i put an auto update ajax call for every 1-2 seconds it will put a lot of burden on server.

So I am wondering is there any better way to handle this type of stuff? how do twitter/facebook do update user’s feeds?

Answer 1

AJAX or not, bidding systems always have high requests because people keeps refreshing the page to check for the latest bid information.

You can take a look and attempt long polling. Long polling a method where you “push” data from the server to the browser in response to the browser’s HTTP request. It is a normal HTTP connection. This may reduce the number of requests sent from users to server, however you will still have many open and active connections between your users and your server.