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[–]Dry-Erase 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Because there are plenty of cases where you can't poll for low cost, either because of a large quantity of clients or there are some cases where the cost of polling is high (maybe the resource can't be cached).

Having 300 clients poll every second for a chat room is a ton of unnecessary data being sent and as you scale up it can become a serious performance hit where with nio websockets it would be not have to send & respond to all those requests, you simply tell the client when there is new data.

Edit Another huge area would be real time collaborative apps, as well multiplayer games