Live Updating Widget for 100+ concurrent users

Question

Hi there

what would you use if you had to have a div box on your website that would have to be updated constantly with new HTML content from the server.

simple polling is probably not very resource inefficient - imagine also having 10'000 users and the div has to update.

what is the most efficient or elegant solution for such a problem?

are there existing widgets which contain this "autoupdate" functionality?

Answer 1

Consider using memcached. By caching content in memory you will reduce the number of calls to the (database?) server that generates the content.

To keep the content up to date you should use the memcache pattern. A short expiration time will provide more up to date content, a long expiration time will provide better performance.