I’m wanting to stream data from a client (desktop or mobile) to a hosted server. It’s not a large amount of data, 1 byte every 1/10 second – but the data needs to be streamed immediately (no buffering) and the connection needs to stay active for a long period of time (say 10 minutes max).
Because the server is hosted, I don’t have the ability to use sockets – just http.
I know on the server side, if I was connecting to a client I can do this using persistent connections and just writing to the response stream.
But is there a way to do this in reverse, where a client has a persistent connection to the server and is writing to the request stream?
Clarification:
I don’t have to have this client->server communication done as persistent http connection, I was just wondering if it was possible, just so I could have symmetry with my planned server->client persistent http connection.
From what I’m hearing, it sounds like I should just be able to do individual http posts and achieve the same or similar latency.
I’ll go ahead and provide the answer to my own question, which seems to be:
It’s technically possible to do a persistent http connection from client->server, but nobody’s implemented it yet because using the normal method of creating individual http requests seems to be fast enough for everybody’s purposes.
So that’s what I ended up doing, simply using WebRequest.Create and the HttpWebRequest class and trusting that the framework is handling KeepAlive. And in my prototypes that seems to be fast enough, although real-world performance remains to be seen.