Question

It’s a simple case of a javascript that continuously asks ‘are there yet?’ Like a four year old on a car drive.. But, much like parents, if you do this too often or, with too many kids at once, the server will buckle under pressure..

How do you solve the issue of having a webpage that looks for new content in the order of every 5 seconds and that allows for a larger number of visitors?

Answer 1

stackoverflow does it some way, don’t know how though.

The more standard way would indeed be the javascript that looks for new content every few seconds.

A more advanced way would use a push-like technique, by using Comet techniques (long-polling and such). There’s a lot of interesting stuff under that link.

I’m still waiting for a good opportunity to use it myself…

Oh, and here’s a link from stackoverflow about it:
Is there some way to PUSH data from web server to browser?