Data stream, which way to go?

Question

I am about to start a HTML5 game, with heavy logic in java script, I want to keep some logic at the server side, so that I guarantee that my game will play only at my server.

I decided to chose node.js, as its very fast, I thought about two ways:

1. To use AJAX, client side will call a server side method which will return calculated numbers to refresh the game scene, this call will be called every 2 second.

2. To open a socket using node.js, so that client don't have to call the server each time, instead, it keep listening to data streamed from the opened socket, which will refresh data every x seconds.

The calculated data is not big, its about 0.5 kb per one second, client also needs to tell server what's the status, so data sent from client is about 0.1 kb / x second, depends on game play.

It seems that the second approach is better, but, I will need hundred of ports to handle concurrent players ..

So, in term of performance & minimizing used bandwidth, which way to chose? or, is there even a better way? any one can help?

Answer 1

As you mentioned you are creating a web-based JavaScript application that regularly sends information to, or retrieves updates from, a server then in my opinion you should use WebSocket(especially you are developing in HTML5), which reduce the amount of bandwidth your application uses.

In term of performance, I would chose WebSocket aswell, by doing some measurement experiments e.g averaging a round trip time for 100 requests at a time, WebSocket has a lower round trip time. Here is a link of a performance test might tell the result: http://www.peterbe.com/plog/are-websockets-faster-than-ajax