I wanted to implement sse for notifications, so the user can get new notifications.
What is the downside of fetching that data in intervals in my frontend? Cant I just do that? Why is it common to use sse or websockets instead of fetching data periodically?
Thanks
Polling is always a tradeoff between how often (and thus how much resource wastage, in this case of client and server CPU, client battery, and network traffic) vs. latency of noticing a notification.
I'd be annoyed if every one of the dozen tabs I have open was wasting CPU time and network traffic to contact some server every few seconds or minutes. Minutes wouldn't to totally terrible, but it would mean the worst case latency for a notification to pop up would be minutes after the thing happened, unlike on Stack Overflow where comment notifications happen within a second or so.
From the server's PoV, it would potentially pile up a lot of traffic if everyone with the page open was making an HTTP request every few seconds, not just users that were actively clicking on things that needed server interaction.
Polling every second would be bad enough waiting for something locally; it would be ridiculous in a case like yours involving network traffic. This is why we have event-driven methods of doing things all the way from low-level I/O (DMA + interrupts) to user-space socket APIs (select/poll) to GUI application to network stuff.
Polling is the easy but ugly solution. Either amateur-hour or done as a fallback if no better API is available. IDK if it would make sense to do it while prototyping before implementing the proper way in this case, or as a fallback, but it's not a good plan A.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polling_(computer_science)
Related
I am writing a PHP backend, JS/Jquery front end application that will allow users to "communicate" in near real time. That is the hope at least, my question is what is my best course of action? Am I best to use WebSockets to send data between the server and client or would use AJAX and some sort of timer (x amount of seconds) be better. My worry with the AJAX way is that it may be taxing on the server to have 10+ clients all asking for data every 15-30 seconds. I need it to be near real-time and so 5 minutes is not really realistic.
An example of what I am trying to do would be if I had 5 users all on a page and user 1 updates their status, I would want users 2,3,4, and 5 to see the update as fast as possible without having to refresh.
I am mixed on what I think is best and I don't want to start doing it one way and find out it is insecure or terrible after getting halfway done. What is my best route with an application like this?
Here's a list of popular possible solutions:
Short polling (what you're referring to in AJAX
Long Polling (AJAX too, but not too many requests)
Websockets
WebRTC
So, for short polling as you've said it consumes lots of resources so let's remove that from the list.
as for long polling, its idea is that a request is send to server and the server doesn't respond unless a new event has happened (keeps the request) but its rarely used in modern development. so If you're going to work with other developers its kind of bad decision.
for WebRTC, browser compatibility is not that great and still a draft in W3C.
Thus, you're left out with WebSockets, and yes they consume ram but not CPU. ram is much cheaper (and it doesn't consume that much too).
As for security they can be considered equal (except for WebRTC which is better because it is actually P2P Communication)
Side note: don't overthink it :)
Here's some resources that can help you:
https://webrtc.org/
https://github.com/walkor/phpsocket.io //Socket library for PHP similar to Socket.io
https://socket.io
What are the realtime communication protocols available for the web? List of the protocols
https://codeburst.io/polling-vs-sse-vs-websocket-how-to-choose-the-right-one-1859e4e13bd9 great article for polling, websockets & covers SSE too
there is one way to make the RTC, RealTime App, Just Use the Socket.io "WebSocket " for signaling and before that take a full view of these webPages:
https://bloggeek.me/
https://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/webrtc
https://w3c.github.io/webrtc-pc/#rtcsignalingstate-enum
https://www.w3.org/TR/mediacapture-streams/#legacy-interface-extensions
and i start to development this technology with this book enter link description here it will open your view of RTC usage and All Details.
I discovered SSE (Server Sent Events) pretty late, but I can't seem to figure out some use cases for it, so that it would be more efficient than using setInterval() and ajax.
I guess, if we'd have to update the data multiple times per second then having one single connection created would produce less overhead. But, except this case, when would one really choose SSE?
I was thinking of this scenario:
A new user comment from the website is added in the database
Server periodically queries DB for changes. If it finds new comment, send notification to client with SSE
Also, this SSE question came into my mind after having to do a simple "live" website change (when someone posts a comment, notify everybody who is on the site). Is there really another way of doing this without periodically querying the database?
Nowadays web technologies are used to implmement all sort of applications, including those which need to fetch constant updates from the server.
As an example, imagine to have a graph in your web page which displays real time data. Your page must refresh the graph any time there is new data to display.
Before Server Sent Events the only way to obtain new data from the server was to perform a new request every time.
Polling
As you pointed out in the question, one way to look for updates is to use setInterval() and an ajax request. With this technique, our client will perform a request once every X seconds, no matter if there is new data or not. This technique is known as polling.
Events
Server Sent Events on the contrary are asynchronous. The server itself will notify to the client when there is new data available.
In the scenario of your example, you would implement SSE such in a way that the server sends an event immediately after adding the new comment, and not by polling the DB.
Comparison
Now the question may be when is it advisable to use polling vs SSE. Aside from compatibility issues (not all browsers support SSE, although there are some polyfills which essentially emulate SSE via polling), you should focus on the frequency and regularity of the updates.
If you are uncertain about the frequency of the updates (how often new data should be available), SSE may be the solution because they avoid all the extra requests that polling would perform.
However, it is wrong to say in general that SSE produce less overhead than polling. That is because SSE requires an open TCP connection to work. This essentially means that some resources on the server (e.g. a worker and a network socket) are allocated to one client until the connection is over. With polling instead, after the request is answered the connection may be reset.
Therefore, I would not recommend to use SSE if the average number of connected clients is high, because this could create some overhead on the server.
In general, I advice to use SSE only if your application requires real time updates. As real life example, I developed a data acquisition software in the past and had to provide a web interface for it. In this case, a lot of graphs were updated every time a new data point was collected. That was a good fit for SSE because the number of connected clients was low (essentially, only one), the user interface should update in real-time, and the server was not flooded with requests as it would be with polling.
Many applications do not require real time updates, and thus it is perfectly acceptable to display the updates with some delay. In this case, polling with a long interval may be viable.
I want to implement web site that will display to user a notification about some event happened on server. My plan is:
to make an asynchronous request to the server (ASP.NET) which will have a 600 seconds time-out
if event occurs on the server in the time interval of these 600 seconds server will response with an event details
if event is not occurred the server then server will send an 'no event' response at the end of 600 seconds
JS upon receiving a feedback from server will process the response and send the next request.
The problem of the approach is that for a big amount of visitors web site will have a lot of 'pending' requests.
Questions:
Should I consider that as a problem? What is solution for that? Probably I should implement another approach?
Please advice, any feedback is welcome.
I don't know specifics about asp.net's handling of pending requests, but what you are describing is basically long-polling. It's tricky for a number of reasons, including but not limited to:
each pending request consumes a thread, and you'll need to store state on each of those threads
if you have enough connections (not necessarily all that many; see above), you'll need them to span multiple machines, and you then need to come up with an architecture to distribute endpoints across those machines, and make sure each incoming request goes to the right machine. If you're only broadcasting the same data to all your users, this becomes much easier.
proxies or ISPs or what-have-you may shut down your long-poll request. You'll need an architecture resilient to that.
Here's a question about long-polling in asp.net: How to do long-polling AJAX requests in ASP.NET MVC? It's probably a good place to start.
Also you could consider a 3rd-party service like pusher to handle these connections for you, or (disclaimer: I work on App Engine) App Engine's Channel API.
Surely you could make more frequent requests to the server that do not consume server resources for 10 whole minutes?
e.g. send an AJAX request every 60 seconds or so, and return whether or not any event has occurred. The downside is that it could take up to a minute for a user to see notification about some event, so if you need it more or less immediately, that is a problem.
If it does have to be immediate, it seems like looking into "long polling" with something like node.js might be a solution, though non-trivial to implement.
I have a need to send alerts to a web-based monitoring system written in RoR. The brute force solution is to frequently poll a lightweight controller with javascript. Naturally, the downside is that in order to get a tight response time on the alerts, I'd have to poll very frequently (every 5 seconds).
One idea I had was to have the AJAX-originated polling thread sleep on the server side until an alert arrived on the server. The server would then wake up the sleeping thread and get a response back to the web client that would be shown immediately. This would have allowed me to cut the polling interval down to once every 30 seconds or every minute while improving the time it took to alert the user.
One thing I didn't count on was that mongrel/rails doesn't launch a thread per web request as I had expected it to. That means that other incoming web requests block until the first thread's sleep times out.
I've tried tinkering around with calling "config.threadsafe!" in my configuration, but that doesn't seem to change the behavior to a thread per request model. Plus, it appears that running with config.threadsafe! is a risky proposition that could require a great deal more testing and rework on my existing application.
Any thoughts on the approach I took or better ways to go about getting the response times I'm looking for without the need to deluge the server with requests?
You could use Rails Metal to improve the controller performance or maybe even separate it out entirely into a Sinatra application (Sinatra can handle some serious request throughput).
Another idea is to look into a push solution using Juggernaut or similar.
One approach you could consider is to have (some or all of) your requests create deferred monitoring jobs in an external queue which would in turn periodically notify the monitoring application.
What you need is Juggernaut which is a Rails plugin that allows your app to initiate a connection and push data to the client. In other words your app can have a real time connection to the server with the advantage of instant updates.
I've been wondering if there is a real advantage to using COMET / push-technologies over the much simpler polling with long requests where the server will wait a certain maximum time for new events to happen before telling the clients that nothing happened.
Both technologies have similar client latencies and while common wisdom is that long requests are worse because they need to establish a new connection, there's also the fact that there is HTTP keep-alive -- so in the end, both seem to produce a very similar amount of traffic / load.
So is there some clear advantage to using COMET?
AFAIK polling with long requests pretty much IS comet. Polling with short requests is not.
Some advantages I can think of:
Makes client programming easier.
Minimum latency between the real event and the notification reaching the client. With polling this has a mean time of [POLL TIME]/2 and a worst case of [POLL TIME].
Can minimize the resources needed in the server. See this article for example. New server technologies need to be used for this to happen.