Jim,
Are you sure that simple polling is really too "bandwidth wasteful"
for your application? You can make a lot of HTTP requests for a tiny
file without coming close to the bandwidth needed for even small media
files. A single dedicated web server should be able to service many
thousands of requests per second. If each client was checking every 5
minutes (= 300 seconds), you could quite possibly scale to over a
million clients talking to just 1 basic web server.
If you are serving media files from the same server, I would first
look at that as the bottleneck. Those could eat up your server
resources much faster than the polling. One simple solution would be
moving your media files to a service such as Amazon S3, and then have
the "gateway" server just service polling requests.
When you say "data" -- are these static files, or something that needs
server-side scripts to return?
Generally speaking, there is no general solution. You need to define
the actual requirements -- how frequent is the polling, how many users
must you support, what is your budget, what kind of data are you
serving, etc.
HTH
Here is what I want to do:
Lets say I have a large number of rev apps that will go to a web
server and grab some data/image when told to do so (when given a
signal to do so).
I could have these apps poll a text file or something on a web
server every so many minutes but I want a less 'bandwidth wasteful'
way to inform these apps to act.
What is the best way to do this? UDP? TCP server/client? Something
else?
What obstacles might I encounter?
sim
_______________________________________________
use-revolution mailing list
use-revolution@lists.runrev.com
Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription
preferences:
http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution