Long Polling, Number Of Connections

[Rainfly_X]

I'm working on a project that would greatly benefit from being able to support lots of long-polling clients simultaneously, for long periods each. Obviously that would eat a lot of connections, and I don't want to be a dick to the rest of the people on Stevie with a resource-heavy site. What's your policy regarding maximum connection count, or put another way, is there a way I can do this without potentially ruining everything for everyone else on Stevie?

[Krydos]

First of all, you shouldn't reach that limit because browsers (are supposed to) only request two resources at a time. However, if you did reach that limit, your site would simply experience a "Service Temporarily Unavailable" page until the traffic subsided.

 

I do want to point out the fact that it takes about 1/10 of a second to serve a static resource, and since browsers fetch two resources at a time, you would need (10*8)/2, or 40 clients per second to cause this error.

mod_vhost_limit is set to a max of 8 connections I believe.

[Rainfly_X]

Thanks, Krydos. It looks like I'm going to have to figure out some other way to do what I'm trying to do, because supporting 8 people at a time is kinda low. I'm sure there's another way to do it yet that I just haven't figured out. I'm starting to see why RESTful P2P rendezvous servers aren't a thing.

[Guest xaav]

Sorry, but out hardware limitations dictate that we can only serve a limited number of people at a time without crashing our server. If one person is taking up all the connections, it wouldn't be fair to other users.

[Ice IT Support]

You will be able to serve more than 8 people at a time, but not simultaneously.