CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javascriptlong-polling
Terry Morgan
Terry Morgan

Reputation: 114

Best practice: very long running polling processes in Javascript?

I have a touch screen kiosk application that I'm developing that will be deployed on the latest version of Chrome.

The application will need to make AJAX calls to an web service, every 10 minutes or so to pull thru any updated content.

As it's a kiosk application, the page is unlikely to be reloaded very often and theoretically, unless the kiosk is turned off, the application could run for days at a time.

I guess my concern is memory usage and whether or not a very long running setTimeout loop would chew through a large amount of memory is given sufficient time.

I'm currently considering the use of Web Workers and I'm also going to look into Web Sockets but I was wondering if anyone had any experience with this type of thing?

Cheers, Terry

Upvotes: 2

Views: 876

Answers (1)

Joseph
Joseph

Reputation: 119827

The browser has a garbage collector so no problems on that. as long as you don't introduce memory leaks through bad code. here's an article and another article about memory leak patterns. that's should get you started on how to program efficiently, and shoot those leaky code.

also, you have to consider the DOM. a person in SO once said that "things that are not on screen should be removed and not just hidden" - this not only removes the entity in a viewing perspective, but actually removes it from the DOM, remove it's handlers, and the memory it used will be freed.

As for the setTimeout, lengthen the interval between calls. Too fast, you will chew up memory fast (and render the page quite... laggy). I just tested code for a timer-based "hashchange" detection, and even on chrome, it does make the page rather slow.

research on the bugs of chrome and keep updated as well.

Upvotes: 2

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