PHP, javascript, ajax - communication between 2 users

Question

Good day to all.

I need to do this:

When user X press a button user Y sees a photo. Before that user Y sees nothing.

I did this like this: I created a database on a mysql server and created a table with photos and flags. When user X presses the button I send an ajax request and change the flag to the corresponding photo. User Y also sends ajax request every 1 sec to see if anything has changed.

Sounds ok, looks ok, works... it does but to so ok. When 100000 users send 1 ajax request every 1 second the server crashes. First mysql server then apache.

So... my question is is there anyway to do this without so many ajax requests? Something like send the page with a certain "thing" that tells the browser to keep the same socket and send later the image? Something like a stream but instead of images to be html pages/images/whatever.

I know java applet would be a solution but I would need a php(for server side)+js(for client side) solution.

And yes I know that I'll probably get an "you can't" answer but it deserves a try.

Answer 1

What about WebSockets ?

edit. HTTP keep-alive might help.

Answer 2

Because HTTP is stateless, you need to create a permanent or long-lasting socket connection between clients and server.

This is a chat application, written in PHP, AJAX and Ruby backend.

Web Chat application main page , more specifically the part about the socket server