Jump to content

Real Time Update?


Schemata

Recommended Posts

So I had an idea. What if (maybe a feature down the road) you included live update.

What I mean by this is, when someone posts a new topic it INSTANTLY appears under the last post (if you are currently viewing the post).

Similar to what facebook has, it refreshes every so often and if you just sit at your home page for a minute, it will slide down and show "2 new posts"

What if it instantly slid down to show the new post instead of refreshing. I think this would help cut down on "Edit: Johnny beat me to it, 2 seconds before me"

Any ideas on how this might work? I am not a coder, but I am guessing something like Javascript or JQuery?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

It's doable from a programming perspective. The problem is resources. Software as big as IPB is can be resource heavy at times already, and having it query the script every 2 seconds or 5 seconds or whatever to see if there are new posts would multiply the resource usage exponentially.

Link to comment
Share on other sites


It's doable from a programming perspective. The problem is resources. Software as big as IPB is can be resource heavy at times already, and having it query the script every 2 seconds or 5 seconds or whatever to see if there are new posts would multiply the resource usage exponentially.



When you say resources are you just talking Bandwith?


I think speed is a big + for everyone, I think features like this would cause more people to report "slow site" bugs than anything else, and when you browse the forum or refresh the page you get the new posts immediately.



But I want to make it so you don't have to refresh. If you are in the middle of a post, you can't refresh the page without losing your post content.

Overall, I think it is a cool idea. I don't know how many "resources" facebook uses, but maybe this can be an option later on down the road if IPB ever get's it's resource fat trimmed. :)

Thanks guys
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Give it 5 years. The new i7 by Intel could run a 3rd world country. So another 5 years computers and bandwidth streaming will be no problem, thus the upgrade of web pages can begin.


I have a 100mb cable feeding into my house for internet, but they cap it at 5mb or something at the modem (Road Runner). With some nasty tweaks and modifying you can release that cap and get an amazing stream of bandwidth (Don't do it though, illegal). Point being, this will come with time as computers are upgraded and server resources are no longer a problem.

Link to comment
Share on other sites


When you say resources are you just talking Bandwith?




He means anything the server needs to run the PHP script - RAM for the script to load into, CPU to run the script on, network connections for SQL, etc.
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Management

It would be simple to do but would have the effect of everyone refreshing the page every 2 to 4 seconds which would mean certain death for most shared servers. Facebook manage it because they have hundreds of powerful webservers. The average forum admin gets a small slice of one shared server.

Link to comment
Share on other sites


It would be simple to do but would have the effect of everyone refreshing the page every 2 to 4 seconds which would mean certain death for most shared servers. Facebook manage it because they have hundreds of powerful webservers. The average forum admin gets a small slice of one shared server.




I didn't realize it was such a big resource hog. wow. Thank you though, this fully answers my question.
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Again this is another post where people are trying to join social website ideas with a professional forum. IPB is there to post and read info, not chat (although there is the shoutbox for that). Generally people don't post within a few seconds of a post been made in the same topic, so it's beneficial to save all the resources you can so when someone is on the board it's faster.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Shoutbox has been heavily optimized for this sort of thing. It has appropriate caches and it's one (or a small number, can't remember) of "instances". You can easily tell quickly from a timestamp if there are new shouts. A forum with a lot of activity, however, can quickly consume a lot of resources trying to act in the same manner.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 2 years later...

It would be simple to do but would have the effect of everyone refreshing the page every 2 to 4 seconds which would mean certain death for most shared servers. Facebook manage it because they have hundreds of powerful webservers. The average forum admin gets a small slice of one shared server.


No its not that recource intensive as refreshing page and you can set option to enable/disable it.
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.

  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...