I'm writing a 'real time' chat system for about 100 users. I've got most of it thought out in my head, but am now having an internal debate about the best way to update the clients (iframe chat embedded in another web page). The two methods I was thinking of were:

1. javascript 5 second refresh. If no new messages, return 204 OK http header, if amended, send X last messages; or
2. use HTTP Keepalive to pump out the chat in almost real time, closing and refreshing the pages every few minutes.

Has anyone got any thoughts on what the ad/disadvantages of each system would be, or is there an even better route I'm missing here? The application is in house, so client problems are irrelevent.

cLive ;-)

ps - oh, of course, the whole thing will be written in Perl - that's the On Topic aspect of this :)

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