Currently in the process of building a social network, I am working on fetching live notifications. The current approach involves sending an AJAX request every few seconds using setInterval. The code snippet for this operation is as follows:
setInterval ( function(){
url = base_dir+"/ajax/file.php";
data = "data=someData";
$.ajax({
type: "POST",
url: url,
data: data,
dataType: "json",
beforeSend: function(x) {
if(x && x.overrideMimeType) {
x.overrideMimeType("application/json;charset=UTF-8");
}
},
success: function(JSON){
// retrieve data here
}
});
}, 5000);
Although this method works effectively, my concern lies with the potential server overload it may cause. Experimenting with the comet technique didn't yield desired results either, as it seemed to generate more requests compared to the previous approach. Are there alternative techniques available for efficiently pushing this live data?
EDIT: In order to implement long polling, I followed the example provided at :
(function poll(){
url = base_dir+"/ajax/file.php";
data = "data=someData";
$.ajax({
type: "POST",
url: url,
data: data,
dataType: "json",
beforeSend: function(x) {
if(x && x.overrideMimeType) {
x.overrideMimeType("application/json;charset=UTF-8");
}
},
success: function(JSON){
// retrieve data here
},
complete: poll,
timeout: 5000
});
})();
It's possible that there might be some misunderstanding on my part regarding the comet principle.
PHP code:
// Checks for new notifications, and updates the title and notifications bar if there are any
private static function NotificationsCounter (){
//self::$it_user_id = query that retrieves my id for further checks;
//$friend_requests_count = query that retrieves the friend requests count;
//$updates_count = query that retrieves the updates count;
$total_notifications = $friend_requests_count+$updates_count;
if ($total_notifications > 0) $addToTitle = "(".$total_notifications.")";
else $addToTitle = "";
if ($updates_count > 0) $counterHTML = "<span class='notification_counter' id='updates_counter' style='float: right;'>".$updates_count."</span>";
else $counterHTML = "";
$data = array("counter"=>$total_notifications,"addToTitle"=>$addToTitle,"counterHTML"=>$counterHTML,);
echo json_encode($data); // parse to json and print
}
In light of Facebook also utilizing PHP, how do they manage this process?