Ajax based personal messaging system in PHP

Question

I am trying to build a MySQL, PHP, Ajax based personal messaging system.

There is one table for all messages - msghistory, which looks like that

And another one for users' last message check date records - chkdate.

The system works like this:

When user signs into page, page fires Ajax autocheck. Ajax calls php in every 10 sec. PHP side checks for new messages by user id. At first checks chkdate, then checks msghistory: If there are no message after last check date then system will not notify user, else will notify about this

I think this way will load server heavily, if there are 1000s of users. I wonder if explained above way is optimal? if not, what do you think about this, which way is better?

Answer 1

Long polling is a good idea. Here's approximately how it works (though you can vary the lengths of time used). Have your PHP script (the one the client requests) run a (semi-)infinite loop that checks for a new message in the database. If no message is found, use the sleep() function to wait for ten seconds or so before the loop goes through again. Once a message is found, send it out to the client and break out of the loop. The client can then display the message, then start a new request to the "long polling" PHP script, another ten seconds later.

Here is a demo PHP script: $username=$_GET["username"];

<?php
while(1) {
    $messages=mysql_query("SELECT * FROM `msghistory` WHERE `to_id`='$username'");
    if (!mysql_num_rows($messages) === 0) {
        //do whatever message processing and printout you need to do here
        break;//break out of the loop. the script terminates and returns its messages to the client
    }
}
?>

In the near future, we are going to see the implementation of WebSockets, which allow for real-time, push-pull communication between client and server. In many cases, though, this technology is not yet ready for use. Until then, long polling is the way to go.