jquery and server issue

i have a number let say ... number of visitors for a page (it's not that but similar in some way)

i'm using jquery to show how many visitors the site got , and i have a div that contain the number let say

<div id="counter"> </div>

and in the jquery i have the followings :

<script>

// the call for the update (it just change an entry in the db total = total + 1;	
	function autoupdate() {
	
	$.post("count.php", {count:1},
  function(data){
   $("#counter").html(data);
  });}

// the 1 sec interval  
  $(document).ready(function() {
    setInterval("autoupdate()", 1000);
  }); 
  </script>

Code (markup):

question : would that be too harsh on a server if it receive a lot of visitors ?

my aim is to show a live counter , with live update like gmail (like how many mb they are hosting .. i know their example is fake ...but wanted to do something similar)

 

Maybe.. If you're loading it every second for every person that has the page open. It's not just that you're loading a page so much either, but you're connecting to a database each time and running an update query and I assume another query to get the new total. I'm really not sure what the best method would be.