Technology behind real-time polling

manpreet Best Answer 2 years ago

I am looking at facebook news feed/ticker right now and I am wondering what technology/architecture it uses to pull in data asynchronously when any of my connections make an update. One possibility that I can think of is a javascript setInterval on a function that aggressively polls the server for new data.

I wonder how efficient that is.

Another possible technology that I can think of is something like Comet/NodeJS architecture that pings the client when there is an update on the server. I am not too familiar with this technology.

If I wanted to create something similar to this. What should I be looking into? Is the first approach the preferred way to do this? What technologies are available out there that will allow me to do this?