With the continued interest in Ajax, Port80 received a new comment overnight that warrants a post of its own.
One of our blog readers referenced a post for an idea that another blog author dubbed "Continuous Ajax Requests":
http://www.plasser.net/blog/continuous_ajax_requests
After reading the post above, we'll just call this approach "How to Spends Lots of Money on Hardware without Even Trying".
The basic idea espoused is to get a browser to have a continuous connection open with a server using XmlHTTPRequest and then, every so often, time it out and then re-establish the connection. This would allow you to have a full, synchronous connection and do chat and all sorts of fun stuff.
There is problem, however: if you hold connections open on your Web server that are idle, you will severely limit the Web server’s ability to handle traffic and scale to meet load. You may be able to somewhat mitigate this problem with some tuning to your TCP stack and Web server software. Ultimately, if you program this way, be prepared to purchase a great amount of servers to handle any sizable load.
Have a great weekend, and make sure to check out the new httpZip 3.5.6 for advanced IIS compression.
Cheers,
Port80