jquery - Ajax chat polling bandwidth efficiency

Question

I've written a small web application which is basically a JQuery powered chat client within the browser, to get the posts I'm polling the server with an AJAX request and then appending any new replies, I'm worried about making this as efficient as possible while not losing the realtime feel.

http://darklightweb.co.uk/RealTime/

I can't see any way that interrupts are possible so I am polling a page every 5 seconds that returns nothing if no new posts are available to keep data-transfer down if it's idle, if it does have a message the top message in the queue is sent out and I'm checking again as soon as the Ajax request has finished until the message queue is empty.

Any other tips on making this as low-bandwidth as possible or possible alternate implementations?

Answer 1

Polling might not be the best solution for implementing a chat - I'd suggest taking a look at JQuery's implementation of COMET which keeps an open connection to the client and pushes updates from the server 'down' and is also quite scalable.