Mar 25 2006
Comet
So what if you extend AJAX running with a keepalive connection to allow the server to send updates/events to the browser code based on server side events? Good in concept, and maybe it’s called Comet. OK fine, you could do some fun and useful stuff with this, but don’t say it scales. I’m tired of hearing great ideas that aren’t practical on a large scale (and keeping a connection open to EVERY user isn’t, no matter how you pitch it). Great for creating some wonderful dittys, and some limited deployment apps, but not for scaleable web apps. So many people don’t get this, it’s amazing! I think these ideas have their place, and the creativity is great, but the naivete doesn’t help anyone.
You never answer my e-mails and come have lunch with me.
I’m taking a job at google and turned down the other job.
most servers will timeout their connections in any case wtihout some traffic. If imagine that one megabyte is requried for each real connection then each gigabyte of memory gives 1000 connections. 32 gig gives 32000, etc. Except the law of large numbers tells us that we can no rely on a statistical distribution that allows more efficent sharing of resources. So maybe if we tun our server implementation for a large amount of memory and many connections we might that with 64 gigabytes of RAM I might find that rather than 64000 users I can support one or two orders of magnitude more. That is a big number. Anyway, I just wanted to hassle you.
This could be useful in single-user or LAN/intranet applications; for example, if you’ve got your own server running your own webmail app, for example, it could be useful to be notified when new mail arrives.
On the other hand: is that really more useful than simply doing what GMail appears to do, and simply have the Ajax app “refresh” itself (by calling the database) every couple of minutes or so? Probably depends on what resolution of data updates you need.
Maybe for IM apps or even financial apps, this could be very useful.
(BTW, I’m the “grim meathook future” guy; found your site via Technorati.)