Okay, I know it sounds generic. But I mean on an AJAX level. I've tried using Firebug to track the NET connections and posts and it's a mystery. Does anyone know how they do the instant autosave constantly without DESTROYING the network / browser?
My guess (and this is only a guess) is that google uses a PUSH service. This seems like the most viable option given their chat client (which is also integrated within the window) also uses this to delivery "real time" messages with minimal latency.
I'm betting they have a whole setup that manages everything connection related and send flags to trigger specific elements. You won't see connection trigers because the initial page visit establishes the connection then just hangs on the entire duration you have the page open. e.g.
You visit the page
The browser established a connection to [example]api.docs.google.com[/example] and remains open
The client-side code then sends various commands and receives an assortment of responses.
These commands are sent back and forth until you either:
Lose the connection (timeout, etc.) in which case it's re-established
The browser window is closed
Example of, how I see, a typical communication:
SERVER: CLIENT:
------- -------
DOC_FETCH mydocument.doc
DOC_CONTENT mydocument.doc 15616 ...
DOC_AUTOSAVE mydocument.doc 24335 ...
IM collaboratorName Hi Joe!
IM_OK collaboratorName OK
AUTOSAVE_OK mydocument.doc OK
Where the DOC_FETCH command is saying I want the data. The server replies with the corresponding DOC_CONTENT <docname> <length> <contents>. Then the client triggers DOC_AUTOSAVE <docname> <length> <content>. Given the number of potential simultaneous requests, I would bet they keep the "context" in the requests/responses so after something is sent it can be matched up. In this example, it knows the IM_OK matches the second request (IM), and the AUTOSAVE_OK matches the first request (AUTOSAVE)--Something like how AOL's IM protocol works.
Again, this is only a guess.
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To prove this, use something like ethereal and see if you can see the information transferring in the background.
Related
In online multiplayer games where the world around you changes frequently (user gets updates from the server about that) - how many alive connections usually are made?
For example WebSockets can be used. Is it an effective way to send all data through the one connection? You will have to check every received message type:
if it's info about the world -> make changes to the world around you;
if it's info about user's personal data -> make changes in your profile;
if it's local chat message -> add new message to the chat window.
..etc.
I think this if .. else if .. else if .. else if .. for every incoming data decreases client-side performance very much. Wouldn't it be better to get world changes from the second WS connection? Then you won't have to check it's type every time. But another types are not so frequent, so the first connection can be for them.
So the question is how developers usually deal with connections count and message types to increase performance?
Thanks
It depends on clientside vs serverside load. You need to balance whether you want to place the load of having more open connections on the server, or the analysis of the payload on the client. If you have a simple game, and your server is terrible, I would suggest placing more clientside load. However, for high-performance gaming functioning with an excellent server, using more WebSockets would be the recommended approach.
When I issue an $.ajax query with a timeout: parameter, and my timeout is met such that error: is invoked, what does that mean?
More specifically:
does that mean the server received the request, but is still processing it? That may mean some effect may occur, so I may have to cancel it on the server, or somehow invalidate data that was already partially written to a database.
Or does that mean I was never able to reach the server at all? This is nice to know since then I don't have to deal with partial data on a server "save"
Or does that mean the request made it part of the way, and now we lost track of it? In this case, I'd have to actually ask the server, "Oh hey, about that request I sent awhile ago... did you get that one? yeah? okay ignore that last save"
OS Commands like tracert make it clear there may be many servers for a TCP command to go through, so if one becomes unresponsive, it's hard to tell if it got it or not. But some protocols require an echo-back to be considered receivable (so I'm not sure if HTTP or Apache is involved in this)
It is how long the client will wait to hear from the server before giving up.
The server may or may not have done its part. The only way for the client to know about that is for the client to be notified. Since you don't want to to leave a process or a human waiting forever, by using a timeout you specify the time to wait for success before giving up.
I am developing a social network in ASP.NET MVC 3. Every user has must have the ability to see connected people.
What is the best way to do this?
I added a flag in the table Contact in my database, and I set it to true when the user logs in and set it to false when he logs out.
But the problem with this solution is when the user closes the browser without logging out, he will still remain connected.
The only way to truly know that a user is currently connected is to maintain some sort of connection between the user and the server. Two options immediately come to mind:
Use javascript to periodically call your server using ajax. You would have a special endpoint on your server that would be used to update a "last connected time" status, and you would have a second endpoint for users to poll to see who is online.
Use a websocket to maintain a persistent connection with your server
Option 1 should be fairly easy to implement. The main thing to keep in mind that this will increase the amount of requests coming into your server, and you will have to plan accordingly in order handle the traffic this could generate. You will have some control over the amount of load on your server by configuring how often javascript timer calls back to your server.
Option 2 could be a little more involved if you did this without library support. Of course there are libraries out there such as SignalR that make this really easy to do. This also has an impact on the performance of your site since each user will be maintaining a persistent connection. The advantage with this approach is that it reduces the need for polling like option 1 does. If you use this approach it would also be very easy to push a message to user A that user B has gone offline.
I guess I should also mention a really easy 3rd option as well. If you feel like your site is pretty interactive, you could just track the last time they made a request to your site. This of course may not give you enough accuracy to determine whether a user is "connected".
I'm using Firebug 1.5.2 and while testing a site before production release i can see a huge amount of time consumed by 'Blocking' parts of the requests.
What exactly does the 'Blocking' mean?
"Blocking" previously (earlier versions of FireBug) was called "Queuing". It actually means that request is sitting in queue waiting for available connection. As far as I know number of persistent connections by default is limited in last versions of Firefox to 6, IE8 also 6. Earlier it was only 2. It can be changed by user in browser settings.
Also as I know that while javascript file is loading, all other resources (css, images) are blocked
Blocking is a term used to describe an event that stops other events or code from processing (within the same thread).
For example if you use "blocking" sockets then code after the socket request has been made will not be processed until the request is complete (within the same thread).
Asynchronous activities (non blocking) would simply make the request and let other code run whilst the request happened in the background.
In your situation it basically means that certain parts of firebug / the browser cannot activate until other parts are complete. I.e. it is waiting for an image to download before downloading more.
As far as I know, two reasons cause components to cause blocking others from loading.
Browser's enforced (but usually configurable) limit of how many parallel resources can be loaded from a particular host at a time.
Inline javascript, which can cause the browser to wait and see if it at all needs to go ahead with downloading the rest of the components (just in case the javascript redirects or replaces the content of the page)
It means "waiting for connection". As explained in the official documentation by Mozilla, "Blocking" is "Time spent in a queue waiting for a network connection." That can be due to Firefox hitting its internal parallel connections limit, as explained there and in answers here.
It can also mean "waiting because server is busy". One possible reason for "Blocking" times is missing in the official documentation linked above: it can happen when the server cannot provide a connection at the time because it is overloaded. In that case, the connection request goes into a queue on the server until it can be processed once a worker process becomes free [source].
In a technical sense, such a connection is not yet established because the request is awaiting accept() from the server [source]. And maybe that is why it is subsumed under "Blocking" by Firefox, as it could also be considered "Time spent in a queue waiting for a network connection".
(This behaviour is not fully consistent as of Firefox 51 though: for the first URL called up in a new tab, the time before the server accepts the connection request is not counted at all in the "Timings" tab – only for subsequent URLs entered. Either of both behaviours could be a bug, I don't know which one.)
I'm trying to create a small and basic "ajax" based multiplayer game. Coordinates of objects are being given by a PHP "handler". This handler.php file is being polled every 200MS, by using ajax.
Since there is no need to poll when nothing happens, I wonder, is there something that could do the same thing without frequent polling? Eg. Comet, though I heard that you need to configure server side applications for Comet. It's a shared webserver, so I can't do that.
Maybe prevent the handler.php file from even returning a response if nothing has to be changed at the client, is that possible? Then again you'd still have the client uselessly asking for a response even though something hasn't changed yet. Basically, it should only use bandwidth and sever resources if something needs to be told to the client, eg. the change of an object's coordinates.
Comet is generally used for this kind of thing, and it can be a fragile setup as it's not a particularly common technology so it can be easy not to "get it right." That said, there are more resources available now than when I last tried it ~2 years ago.
I don't think you can do what you're thinking and have handler.php simply not return anything and stop execution: The web server will keep the connection open and prevent any further polling until handler.php does something (terminates or provides output). When it does, you're still handling a response.
You can try a long polling technique, where your AJAX allows a very large timeout (e.g. 30 seconds), and handler.php spins without responding until it has something to report, then returns. (You'll want to make sure the spinning is not resource-intensive). If handler.php "expires" and nothing happens, have it exit and let AJAX poll again. Since it only happens every 30 seconds, it will be a huge improvement over ~5 times a second. That would keep your polling to a minimum.
But that's the sort of thing Comet is designed for.
As Ajax only offers you a client server request model (normally termed pull, rather than push), the only way to get data from the server is via requests. However a common technique to get around this is for the server to only respond when it has new data. So the client makes a request, the server hangs on to that request until something happens and then replies. This gets around the need for frequent polling even when the data hasn't changed as you only need the client send a new request after it gets a response.
Since you are using PHP, one simple method might be to have the PHP code call the sleep command for 200ms at a time between checks for data changes and then return the data to the client when it does change.
EDIT: I would also recommend having a timeout on the request. So if nothing happens for say 2 seconds, a "no change" message is sent back. That way the client knows the server is still alive and processing its request.
Since this is tagged “html5”: HTML5 has <eventsource> and WebSocket, but the implementation side is still in the future tense in practice.
Opera implemented an old version of <eventsource> called <event-source>.
Here's a solution - use a SaaS comet provider, such as WebSync On-Demand. No server resources to worry about, shared hosting or not, since it's all offloaded, and you can push out the information as needed.
Since it's SaaS, it'll work with any server language. For PHP, there's already a publisher written and ready to go.
The server must take part in this. Check with the hosting provider what modules are available. Or try to convince them to support Comet.
Maybe you should consider a small Virtual Private Server (VPS) for this.
One thing to add on the long polling suggestions: If you're on a shared server, this solution will have limited scalability, as each active long poll will keep a connection (and a server-side process to service that connection) active. Your provider most likely has limits (either policy-defined or de facto) on the number of connections you can have open at a time, so you'll hit a wall if you have more sessions/windows than that playing concurrently.