Efficiency of Polling vs WebSockets
A web application I maintain uses polling from the front end to check if a long running task is complete. A colleague suggested that WebScokets would be a far better alternative in terms of performance and user experience. Having never used WebSockets before and keen to see just how much better it could be, I decided to compare the two approaches to a contrived but similar problem side by side. All code on github here . The problem My hypothetical problem involves jobs. Each job consists of: a unique id a boolean named complete A job is created by a client of the application and after a random duration the job completes (i.e. complete = true). The client needs to know as soon as possible once a job is complete. This can be achieved by the client polling a job's status repeatedly until complete, or receiving a "job completion" event once finished. For both solutions I decided to use Kotlin and the Dropwizard framework. Both of which I