Question

Using setInterval to reload a script – it does not reload before the first amount of time has passed (i.e: waits 120000 msec before actually displaying content). Is there a better way to do this?

 <script id="source" language="javascript" type="text/javascript">
setInterval( "reloading();", 120000  );  
  $(function () {
   reloading = function(){
      $.ajax({                                      
      url: 'api.php',                  
      data: "",                      
      dataType: 'json',               
      success: function(data)         
      {
        var id = data[0];             
          _id = id;
        var vname = data[1];           
        var message = data[2]; 
        var timestamp = data[3]; 
        var field1 = data[4]; 
        _field1 = field1;
        var val2 = parseInt(field1, 10) + 1;
        _val2 = val2;
        $('#output').hide().html(timestamp +message ).fadeIn("slow");   
         $('#username').hide().html( vname ).fadeIn("slow");
              } 
    });
}}); 
  </script>

Answer 1

1 you are declaring reloading as a global variable and accessing it without knowing if your function is ready, that’s not a good idea. If by any chance your site takes more than 2 minutes to load that will never work.

If you want to queue up your re-loads to process once every 2 minutes and run the first time without waiting, you can do it like this:

$(function(){
  function reloading(){
    //whatever you want to process goes here
    (...)

    setTimeout(function(){
      reloading();
    }, 120000);

  }

  reloading();
});

this will load your code once and then wait 12 seconds to run it again, and so on…