NYCPHP Meetup

[Larry Velez]

We built a dedicated chat app for a client's website once.  We used Jabber and a Java client for the front end.  It worked great.
Although they hardly ever had anyone in the chat rooms to really test the system under load.   I know this is not a PHP solution but
I don't think PHP is well suited for a real-time application like IM.

| Larry Velez | http://sinu.com |

-----Original Message-----
From: talk-bounces at lists.nyphp.org [mailto:talk-bounces at lists.nyphp.org] On Behalf Of Chris Shiflett
Sent: Thursday, August 07, 2003 2:26 PM
To: talk at lists.nyphp.org
Subject: [nycphp-talk] Fwd: Undelivered Mail Returned to Sender


--- crisscott at netzero.com wrote:
> That is helpful. I obviously wasn't looking at this from the right 
> angle. But like David mentioned, I would think that having lots users 
> sleeping and polling would cause some strain on the server.

Well, it wouldn't cause much strain at all, since it's only having to send a little chunk every time someone sends a message.

What it does do is tie up connections. Most people who do this consider the Web server to be a chat server and dedicate it to that
purpose (or, at least dedicate some Web server to the purpose, perhaps listening on an alternate port). Because the strain is very
little, you can increase your maximum number of child processes/threads/whatever a ton without increasing your load too much (this
tuning requires a bit of experience with tuning Web servers, but trial an error is also very educational). You just need to be able
to support a connection for every user in a chat.

Hope that helps.

Chris

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