Incredibly scalable push technology

They have: 9 posts

Joined: Mar 2005

I am creating a new website that I am very, very excited about. It will have comments appearing in a "push" ajax style manner, so they will appear on your screen without the page reloading.

There will be hundreds of thousands (eventually millions) of these coming into all the users browsers. I can have this programmed using anything and can be on any server. I am of course being optimistic, but if this got huge and there were millions of comments being sent back and forth (think twitter style, but ajax), just a small difference in programming method could mean a huge difference in server costs. My question is what would you recommend as the best method for achieving this? I know just straight up AJAX would destroy my server. I am looking for something that is incredibly scalable and just right for this type of application.

ANY help would be greatly appreciated.

They have: 121 posts

Joined: Dec 2008

Are you asking what platform to base things off of?

Why would AJAX destroy your server? AJAX is javascript that runs on the client. Maybe your designed client is sending a large number of requests to the server?
Some of the message implies you haven't built anything yet, and some of it implies you have something built, but performance is a problem.

Don't design a performant application. Design a simple, modular, easily refactorable class heirarchy / code base. Performance can always be added by profiling what you have, seeing where the bottlenecks are and cleaning them up. Often performance problems on apps like these can be cleaned up by tuning the database (or choosing a completely different data storage strategy than the oft chosen RDBMS) rather than tuning code.

Cheers,
Shaggy.

He has: 629 posts

Joined: May 2007

Sounds interesting.

I hope you have alternatives for the unfortunate millions who work for major corporations that have Internet security level set to "high." Scripts don't work for them (and in many more situations beside.)

Cordially, David
--
delete from internet where user_agent="MSIE" and version < 8;

They have: 9 posts

Joined: Mar 2005

What do you mean scripts dont work for them? like javascript?

Have you guys heard of comet? I was just directed to it: http://ajaxian.com/archives/comet-a-new-approach-to-ajax-applications

Want to join the discussion? Create an account or log in if you already have one. Joining is fast, free and painless! We’ll even whisk you back here when you’ve finished.