Chat app, Caching? Observe?

Rails
1

Hi,
I am developping a little chat application with rails. On my chat page I
make ajax request every 10 seconds to check if there are news messages.
I think if I keep this thing with a lot of user my performance will get
really low.

How can I improve this? Is is possible to observe when a row is added?
Or how can I effeciently cache the messages?

Thanks,
Greg

2

You might have a look at node.js - I’ve heard recently of apps which
combine
node.js w/ redis pubsub to get a pretty nifty quick experience w/ no
polling. From a scalability and performance point of view, this has a
couple of drawbacks - susceptible to network latencies, quality (may be
better suited for intranet), and second, each client may need it’s own
port
(this for node.js).

Here’s a pretty cool little app -

cheers,

m

3

Greg Ma wrote:

Hi,
I am developping a little chat application with rails. On my chat page I
make ajax request every 10 seconds to check if there are news messages.
I think if I keep this thing with a lot of user my performance will get
really low.

It shouldn’t if you structure your queries efficiently

How can I improve this? Is is possible to observe when a row is added?

Perhaps, but pushing to the browser is difficult or impossible.

Or how can I effeciently cache the messages?

Thanks,
Greg

You’re doing premature optimization. Worry about the bottlenecks when
you can actually measure them, not when you’re just speculating.

Best,

Marnen Laibow-Koser
http://www.marnen.org
[email protected]

4

Maybe you want to give this a try (there seems to be “no activity”
currently, though…)

http://code.google.com/p/canhaschat/