Neeraj's Tech Scribbles

We are often told that client side polling in a typical web-app is a poor design choice but often they don't explain why it is so. Of course, at a high level we know that each client request is associated with a server thread and the thread and it's allocated resources are blocked until the client request finishes. Therefore if we have too many polling type requests which are "no-op"s, we are potentially tying down a lot of server resources essentially serving a bunch of "no-ops" while eating a chunk of memory each.

With web 2.0 we are going to have these type of scenarios, whether we like it or not! So is there a better way? Is anybody doing anything about it? Here are two very interesting articles for anyone looking for answers to these questions:

http://blogs.sun.com/andi/entry/comet_basics



http://www.webtide.com/downloads/whitePaperAjaxJetty.html