I’m trying to decide what the best solution would be for my web application. I have a page that will fire an arbitrary number of ajax requests to retrieve data from the server. For example a page on load may fire 10 ajax requests to the server and each request may take 10 seconds (+-) to return content.
In view of this being a web app in a multi user and multi concurrency environment is it a good idea to use a traditional ajax approach or would you opt for long polling, such as SignalR.
What are the pros/cons of both approaches (Pull vs Push)? Ultimately i’m after the most resource efficient approach.
Thanks
In your stated example you are talking about a pure ‘Pull’ scenario. ie ‘When the page loads I want X, Y, Z to happen and then I want to see the results’.
Long polling/websockets (SignalR) is useful for a Push scenario – ie ‘Oh look I have finished running this super long process… I better tell any users currently connected’.
You can use SignalR to run those normal style AJAX requests… but you wont get any performance enhancements. The AJAX will run asynchronously and in parallel and once the server side process is complete you will a callback that executes. Perhaps you might get a slight increase in performance as signalR will have a continuous connection running, so you will loose the slight delay in creating a connection. On the flip side the server will have a large number of open connections running which may degrade performance (especially if you are hitting it with 10 X 10 sec computations)