Online chat with database - Fastest way?

Question

Hello I'm going to create a web based chatting program. All chats are private, no groupboxes.

I need to keep a log of all the chats. My idea is to push all messages to a mysql database and then check this database every half a second for incoming messages.

Is this the best way for creating the web app? The site should support 2000 users chatting simultaneously.

Are there maybe better options? I've seen people talking about multiple databases, text files, a combination of TCP/IP (IRC) and SQL, etc.

One option is the [subscription](http://redis.io/topics/pubsub) feature of Redis. A MySQL database isn't really well suited for a real-time chat. — Snowball, Aug 22 '12 at 21:09
Related post: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11516746/webbased-chat-in-php-without-using-database-or-file — Mike Christensen, Aug 22 '12 at 21:12

Starx · Answer 1 · 2012-08-22T21:20:00.177

MySQL is capable of handling large amount concurrent request at a time, but how you manage and maintain the database is a main point.

Perfectly maintained and indexed table should show no problem. Keep the table's structure as simple as possible. Something like

+----------------+--------------+-----------------
|    from        |     to       |   message      |
+----------------+--------------+-----------------

And, there is no perfect way to create a chat program. Depends on lots of other factors like

Request Type: AJAX or Comet or WebSocket
Application Coding: No garbage Coding, Clean OO codes following one of more Design pattens
Caching: Cache most of the static information as possible.
Data Archiving or Transaction Handling
Query What do you fetch together with the message (may be those things could be cached before. These things include names, avatar etc)

Online chat with database - Fastest way?

1 Answers1