Thinks at a backgammon online multiplayer game with over 100, or even 1000 online users. The game communication is done using Ajax + 3 seconds Comet connection interval + ASP.NET technology. Is this a real scenario ?
Didn't so many Comet open connections block the server resulting in big latency ?
No it is not scalable. You need to write a light weight server to handle connections. There are already light weight servers written both commercial and open source.
It's doable.
IIS/ASP.NET queues requests, and the queue is serviced by the .NET thread pool. The traditional argument is that a thread blocks whilst it does the work which would be unscalable for the COMET scenarios.
However, ASP.NET offers async http handlers, which means the thread gets returned to the thread pool until the response is ready to be sent back to the client. Check out my blog articles on this matter
http://neilmosafi.blogspot.com/2009/03/comet-pushing-to-web-browser.html http://neilmosafi.blogspot.com/2009/03/comet-bayeux-protocol-and-aspnet.html