Long Polling causing server problems?

I've finally made a simple chat page that I had wanted to make for a while now, but I'm running into problems with my servers.

I'm not sure if long polling is the correct term, but from what I understand, I 开发者_如何学Pythonthink it is. I have an ajax call to a php page that checks a mysql database for messages with times newer than the time sent in the ajax request. If there isn't a newer message, it keeps looping and checking until there is. Else, it just returns the new messages and the client script sends another ajax request as soon as it gets the messages.

Everything is working fine, except for the part where the server on 000webhost stops responding after a few chat messages, and the server on x10 hosting gives me a message about hitting a resource limit.

Maybe this is a dumb way to do a chat system, but it's all I know how to do. If there is a better way please let me know.

edit: Holy hell, it's just occurred to me that I didn't put any sleep time in the while loop on the server.

You can find a lot of reading on this, but I disbelieve that free web hosting is going to allow to do what you are thinking of doing. PHP was also not really designed to create chat systems.

I would recommend using WebSockets, and use for example, Node.JS with Socket.IO, or Tornado with Python; There is a lot of solutions out there, but most of them would require you to run your own server since it requires to run a whole program that interacts with many connections at once instead of simple scripts that just start and finish with a single connection.

What about using the same strategy whether there are newer messages on the server or not. The server would always return a list of newer messages - this list could be empty when there are no newer messages. The empty list could be also be encoded as a special data token. The client then proceeds in both cases the same way: it processes the received data and requests new messages after a time period.

Make sure you sleep(1) your code on each loop, the code gonna enter the loop several times per second, stressing your database/server.

But still, nodejs or websockets are better tecnologies to deal with real time chats.