AJAX Polling Frequency - To long poll or not to long poll?

Question

I\'m building a component of a web page that needs relatively constant database polling. I can see two different approaches for this, and I\'m wondering if one of them is better

Answer 1

Long polling will scale better (i.e. less server load) than polling, while giving much better response times.

If your recipient polls, the average journey time of a message will be half your poll interval.

With long polling, its instant - the server only waits if there is nothing to say.

If you are doing chat messaging, go long poll; its a usability thing.

The down-side with long polling is it is more complicated to implement; but its not that much more complicated, and it is widely implemented. So if you can't use an off-the-shelf framework for your webserver of choice, you can set about writing one reasonably and you will get it working.

Answer 2

You can also look at websockets, part of the newest browsers (or emulated via a Flash file you drop on your page)