Short Polling vs Long Polling vs WebSockets - System Design

Learn the difference between short polling, long polling, and web sockets.

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[VasQuezadilla]

An advantage for short polling is that the server can remain stateless.

Both long polling and web sockets needs to keep a directory of which server contains the connection to the client, which is used to send data to the client whenever it's ready

[ShivamBhaskarNITW]

A perfect video for understanding concepts.

[amrmoneer]

great explanation keep up the good work!!

[neutronstar]

short and concise, I love this. It makes it clear on suitable implementation based on use cases.

[tomstravelingadventures]

Clear and precise explanation... Thank you!

[myrickchow]

Thank you. Your presentation is clear and helpful 😄

[gttmone]

I liked the video as soon as you gave the example with Node.js backend. Props to you ;)

[sakirbey]

great explanation, your videos are very helpful. Thank you Sir.

[mdsadiqurrahman]

Right on the point! Thank you for sharing :)

[glennadams]

Great summary. My analogy for a web socket is a Telnet session.

[jesusdueas]

Finally someone with an accent I can understand!

[ninjaninja]

short polling can have benefits. ie if you want to check if a client is online and the client can ping the rest api every 5 mins to check if it is online. While it pings and gets a response, you can put other useful data in that response.

[jaysonp]

This was great, thank you. Came here to figure out why OpenAI is using short polling with the assistants api lol

[hemanthvijay]

I made one project controlling switches on frontend(react js) and backend server(node js) . multiple users can control switch and all other users should also get get updated status of switch .what should i use in this case polling or web socket or server side event . i used api to post and save data and other client get update the status every 5 seconds from server it works for some time and then i get error .hope you understand and give me a solution

[cbest]

Thanks for sharing .. Does the timeout has to be handled by client app or server ?

[edwardwong]

Webhooks is another possible model that may be good, depending on your requirements.

[hanjang]

In case of long polling, what happens in client side while they are waiting for the message or timeout? Do they still work on different task(Async)? Or do they wait until they get the response from the server(Sync)?

[adamhughes]

I think a nice complimentary video would involve web hooks or some sort of asynchronous callback. Thanks a lot. Also why is short polling bad? At most it makes one connection to the resource just like the other methods. Is it the overhead of setting up connection?

[chihabahmed]

What's a perfect use case for long polling?

Any use case?

Thanks

[jannickbreunis]

Is a webhook called long polling? Great explanation.