I currently have an IRC bot written in C++ which monitors a page written in php for changes and then outputs these changes to the IRC channel. However the current method is rather in-effective as it just constantly polls the page once every 10 seconds and compares it to the last seen version to check if anything has changed. I can decrease the page check interval to about 2-3 seconds before the IRC bot starts to take a performance hit, however this isn't ideal. Often the page I am monitoring can change multiple times within the 10 second period, so a change could be missed, what would be a better method to get the data from the page? considering I control both the page written in PHP, and the IRC bot, but they are on different servers.
The sole purpose of this page is to pass data to the IRC bot, so it could be completely re-implemented as something else if that would be a better solution; the IRC bot also monitors multiple versions of this page to check for different things.
If the data generated by PHP isn't somehow pushed on a stream (broadcast or feed), you don't have any other choice than polling the page, unfortunately.
What you could do is push the data from PHP using broadcast, or make a persistent connection from the bot to the PHP script, or make the PHP calculate the differences itself.