martinlanghoff
930413b133
This is an alternative version of jsupdate.php that acts as a long-running daemon. It will feed/stall/feed JS updates to the client. From the module configuration select "Stream" updates. The client connection is not forever though. Once we reach CHAT_MAX_CLIENT_UPDATES (currently 1000), it will force the client to re-fetch it. This buys us all the benefits that chatd has, minus the setup, as we are using apache to do the daemon handling. Chat still defaults to the normal update method, which is now optimised to take advantage of keepalives -- so this change is safe. The instructions in the config page also indicate that this mode may not be well supported everywhere. It hasn't been tested on IIS for starters. In terms of relative cost -- if each hit on jsupdate.php incurs on ~20 db queries and delivers one update to the client, each hit on jsupdate takes ~20 queries, and then roughly 2~3 queries to serve each of the next 1000 updates. On busy sites, the difference is huge. There is still room for enhancements in both keepalive and stream update methods. I am pretty sure we can trim DB queries more.
Official Chat Module for Moodle ------------------------------ The chat module now supports a backend daemon for more efficiency. It's still buggy and being worked on, but if you want to test it and help out here are some quick instructions: 1) Admin -> Config -> Modules -> Chat -> Settings 2) Set the method to "sockets" and set up the ports etc 3) Start the server like this (from the Unix command line): cd moodle/mod/chat php chatd.php --start & 4) Go to a chat room in Moodle and open it as normal. ------ KNOWN PROBLEMS - User list is not always working - Some browsers (eg Safari) cause lines to be repeated by 10 - 20 times - Occasionally "Document was empty" messages Help solving these very welcome! Martin, 31 July 2004