Is it safe to use ajax requests over and over again?

Question

I want to create a 'mini server' to use on my site (tumblr), for real communication with my visitors and one way to do this is by using ajax requests. When the site loads, it requests a JSON file, when I receive that file the request is made again and so on. When I update the JSON file, the site receives it almost immediately, then the data will be updated for visitors.

I have doubts about doing this, I don’t know if you can crash the site, get a lot of internet or have some bad effect. You think I can do this or there’s some better way?

Answer 1

Everything will depend on the standard size of your answer and the performance of the query. The ideal is to traffic only the data that will be consumed. You can, for example, pass in each request the ID of the last conversation the user searched, and bring the following from that.

One way to do this is to use a javascript function that each x seconds retrieve the data. However, it is important that new requests are made only after the end of the last ones - so it is not advisable to use setInterval, since, if the request takes more seconds to be processed than the query trigger interval, you get a chain of requests. You guarantee this through recursion in a non-animal self-executable function:

(function loop() {
    setTimeout(function() {
        // Inteligência da requisição
        if (complete)
            loop(); // Executa novamente a função quando a requisição atual terminar. Pode ser o **complete** do jQuery.ajax, por exemplo
    }, 5000); // Função, intervalo em milissegundos
})();