Is there a super-high-load (Ajax) chat script out there?

Question

For a pet project, I have been looking for a web chat script capable of running potentially tens of thousands of users simultaneously. I don't want to use any kind of applet or browser extension, so on the client side, it should be simple Ajax. On the server side I'm pretty much open to anything.

I'm not looking for bells and whistles, a simple text-only chat is more than enough, as long as it supports a number of 'channels' or 'rooms' simultaneously, and a very large number of users.

When I first started researching the chat scripts out there, it seemed like the only viable option was to run an IRC server and just build a web interface on top of that. I know I could get good performance and stability with that setup, but could I get better performance by using something else?

Any ideas?

Answer 1

You might want to check cometd

I believe there are some chat scripts already using cometd. I have no idea regarding stability tho.

Answer 2

You can have a look at Jabbify.

Not sure about the rooms and channels part, but it is built on the AJAX and MVC model.