What can i use to realtime data exchange between users of my site.

[SinnerSmile]

Hello gentlemen.As continue to my previous post, I got some important question.Lets imagine that there is a site with around 50 000 users at the same time on it, this users is on different pages of this site (10-20 users on page) and on each page they must exchange small amounts of data with each other in real-time (like chat room for example)How can i do this? there is a way to do this wit AJAX by holding request from user to database on server, until server gives answer... but that way it will mean that 50000 request will be opened all over the site on the same time. Isn't that gonna be insane load on the server, and no hoster will allow this? I mean i can't even understand what does that hanging requests means in terms of load on the server, the data, transfered, going to be extremely small, in what values can even evaluate this load? It will eat up server's RAM, or handling 50000 hanging requests will make effect on processor's performance... it's really unclear for me. I was thinking about APE project http://www.ape-project.org/download/ , but then i need to find hoster that will support APE servers (well or am i misunderstanding something?)...Or there is a way to handle this without any insane loads and without using some side servers e.t.c?

Edited April 19, 2013 by SinnerSmile

[justsomeguy]

You may want a dedicated server for that level of traffic, you're not going to be able to host something like that on a shared hosting plan. You can install whatever you want on a dedicated server.

[SinnerSmile]

Yep, that the way, but how can i even evaluate this? I mean if we are talking about just data exchange, thats simple, but i can't understand what the fact of tonns of opened requests at the same time means for server performance.

[thescientist]

you might want to look into node.js for something like thishttp://nodejs.org/

[justsomeguy]

I mean if we are talking about just data exchange, thats simple, but i can't understand what the fact of tonns of opened requests at the same time means for server performance.

The server will probably have a limit of maybe 256 open connections at one time, meaning that each connection needs to be quick. That means that you'll need an efficient database design and the hardware to support it. Most of the rest just comes down to bandwidth.