way to inform rev apps to get something from web server

[Jim Sims]

Thanks again for the replies & suggestions   :-)

Tourism here and around the world has disappeared so I'm trying to  
expand my computer work to supply my tomatoes and wine. Thanks for the  
help.   :-)

The main concern from the person I talked to was cost of bandwidth, my  
question to this list centered on that but several other issues have  
been expressed here that I will also need to consider.

The internet gambling business is used to very heavy traffic and do  
use load balancers plus they locate machines around the world just in  
case some government decides they want to pull the plug on gambling by  
passing laws or some undersea cable gets cut (happened twice recently  
here in Malta). They are huge businesses with lots of bean counters  
watching where the pennies go.


Andre Garzia:
"As for saving bandwidth, why not use GZip encoding for the transfers,
it saves some bytes."

sims:  Most excellent Andre.  Nice little BBEdit test file went from  
8KB to 4KB - cut things in half  :-) Now I have to see if my Rev CGI  
can do that. My Rev CGI interface makes the alert file when a  
promotion is made/setup. I bet the Rev CGI can do the compress trick  
for me.

Alex Tweedly:
"Extending the polling cycle can help; in fact, you could consider  
making it dynamic, for instance by allowing the server to put into  
that one-line file not just the name of the latest update, but also  
the polling cycle to be used. Then you can (some time in the future,  
if needed) either just increase it, or allow the server to dynamically  
update it. (Marketing - "you can tune the update frequency based on  
number of users to minimize the delay during quiet times while  
avoiding getting overloaded during busy times")."

sims:  Quite ingenious suggestion Alex, very cool. Thanks!


Brian Yennie:
"If you are serving media files from the same server, I would first  
look at that as the bottleneck. Those could eat up your server  
resources much faster than the polling. One simple solution would be  
moving your media files to a service such as Amazon S3, and then have  
the "gateway" server just service polling requests."

sims:  Quite right, thanks Brian. Amazon S3 is a great suggestion.

"When you say "data" -- are these static files, or something that  
needs server-side scripts to return?"

sims:  Anything from a few text chars that popup in a window via my  
app to a video being downloaded. Depends on how 'enthusiastic' the  
Marketing dudes get.

Thanks to all!
sims