I was taking a look through CampFire (http://www.campfirenow.com). (If you don't know if it, just use an ajax "shoutfox" for reference I guess) The system polls the server every 3 seconds for new messages/events/etc. Unless I'm totally out of it, my thoughts are that each poll results in queries: - Check for latest messages - Check for members in room That would mean 2 queries for each of the above every 3 seconds. Surely that isn't the way it's done though, as I would think that would create massively unnecessary serverload. Any ideas how to more efficiently accomplish such a task?
One way out is - when a reply is posted, some fields in the DB are altered and get the value, say, "room1=message_text, member_id=123" the shoutbox script just looks at these fields, outputs them to the shoutbox and clears the fields