Is there any solution for running these kind of operations on DreamHost or other shared hosting environments where I don't have access to tweak apache?
+3
A:
You certainly can, but as long as Apache HTTP server doesn't provide non-blocking IO capabilities (and each polling connection has a server thread associated to it), you'll be running out of memory very fast (after 2-3k connections).
If you meant Apache Tomcat, NIO is turned off by default, and you need to have access to configuration files in order to change this.
Vasil Remeniuk
2010-06-08 17:52:11
Is there a hoster or service that specializes in this at a low cost price point?
KevinM
2010-06-09 03:38:57
It depends on what throughput you expect. If you won't have more than 10k users working simultaneously, any Tomcat or nginx hosting should be fine for you (you can get in contact with hosting providers, and ask them to turn on NIO/comet capabilities in nginx, Tomcat, or whatever else, if thay're turned off by default). If you're targeting for 100k+ users, you should think about hosting your application on the cloud, where you certainly can install and configure like you want anything (I would recommend JBoss Netty for building scalable robust COMET applications).
Vasil Remeniuk
2010-06-09 07:44:37