Tech Note: Ajax and Timers and Tunes, Part 2

Wed, Jul 30, 2008 at 5:41:18 pm PDT

After evaluating the impact of our new live updating code for the “Now Playing” section of the left sidebar, I’ve decided to limit the live updates to registered, logged in users. At our normal peak traffic times, with thousands of browsers checking the server at 30 second intervals via Ajax, the system load was getting a bit too high for comfort.

I even tried caching the output, and storing it on the database server instead of the web server’s file system, but it looks like the bottleneck is the sheer number of simultaneous connections.

So to see the live updates, you’ll need to be logged in to an LGF account.

(I’m not doing all this simply to share my music tastes with the world, by the way. There are many interesting “live update” possibilities that could result in cool new features for LGF. All data is good.)