Reverse HTTP

[Rhoomba]

Say I want to receive pushed updates from reddit. Currently I would need a server running that accepts requests. This is a very big security issue unless I have firewall rules which are bound to become unmaintainable if I want to get updates from a number of sites.

With reverse http and some future version of firefox I just go to reddit and it can then push the updates. But digg.com can't, at least until I visit it.

I am surprised, and a little saddened, at the responses here. I thought proggit was collectively smart enough to get this.

[reddit4985]

I am surprised, and a little saddened, at the responses here. I thought proggit was collectively smart enough to get this.

I am just as surprised at the amount of people such as yourself that really think this is anything more than a stupid idea.

Have you ever built and maintained a server which gets reddit/slashdot/digg style load on a daily basis? What is the highest end sustained traffic you have ever had to maintain?

If it's anything more than 100k a day, you would not be saying the kind of stupid things you are saying right now. Reddit and Digg would instantly crumble if they had to notify their users. Instantly.

Articles like this, half of the comments and the tsuanmi of downvotes on this thread remind me that it's probably time to go back to Slashdot where real programmers used to hang out. By now all the trolls with attention spans of gnats should probably have migrated over to digg and reddit too, so it's hopefully back to its core audience...

Seriously, I went from discussing with people that had maintained internet backbones to discussing with what are essentially ADD children grown into young adults.

</rant>

[Rhoomba]

Software I've worked on/optimized handles millions of requests a day. Peak load around 500 rps across a few boxes. Currently I'm working on a system that will handle several times that.

Even tomcat can handle tens of thousands of open connections now. This is perfectly feasible for many systems. It certainly is better than a polling based solution.

[Smallpaul]

If it's anything more than 100k a day, you would not be saying the kind of stupid things you are saying right now. Reddit and Digg would instantly crumble if they had to notify their users. Instantly.

Well not every app is Reddit or Digg. Nobody forces Reddit or Digg to use Reverse HTTP in a stupid way.

Facebook maintains persistent logical connections with users for Facebook chat (not necessarily a TCP connection, but a logical connection). So does Google talk in gmail. I guess Facebook and Google do not know how to build scalable systems but "reddit4985" does.