MyChat
MyChat is a simple, versatile, lightweight, minimal and efficient chatbox currently in beta testing and in development stages. It uses short-polling AJAX requests and it is thus compatible with any server running MyBB; thanks to a complex algorithm it elaborates data in the most efficient way possible, keeping the waste of resources at its minimum.
Just popping in to say this is a really good shoutbox. I have no doubt that this will be the most stable and popular solution.
Thank you for your feedback Tecca
The problem is the network load. Your shoutbox seems to be sending a request to xmlhttp.php every second. If I have multiple tabs open, each tab sends a request per second. Once you have more than two or three users your server will get a pounding.
For an efficient shoutbox you have to use a different technology for the network part. Something like Node.js, WebSocket, Comet, or some iframe pushing script tags. Anything that allows the client to open one connection, and just keep it open. Same way IRC handles thousands of concurrent users since the 90's. Stone age technology.
The reasons most shoutboxes suck is due to Apache/PHP being particularly ill suited to the task. Spawning or blocking a process for each request just doesn't fly with something that needs realtime updates.
Yes, I set the refresh interval to 1 to show how the chat works with the smallest amount of reload seconds. But obviously it keeps on querying the database and those queries can be increased to an incredibly high value opening multiple browser tabs.
That's why I've already planned something like you said frostschutz. I'm searching for a solution which doesn't involve any framework and PHP sessions handling might be the actual solution. I'll work on it but nevertheless, at the current stages I guess it's better than any other shoutboxes out there, at least for animations and real time shouts deletion.
As a quick solution, a simple mouse movement detect with onfocus and onblur javascript events would stop the main function to be executed if the user is currently watching another browser tab, meaning potentially high resources being saved.
Now live on the live demo site. Pretty easy but efficient
Looks like the bored is closed
Refresh interval of 1 second ? That's nuts lol
I run my board on a dedicated server with 2gb of dedicated ram...
Ehhh, not everyone is going to be running on a dedicated server. So your just developing this plugin for anyone that's running on a dedicated server ? Lol. A one second interval is total madness no matter what your running it on.
Lol your dedicated server is down lol
