Scalable solution for website polling

Posted by Tom Irving on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by Tom Irving
Published on 2011-11-25T14:07:44Z Indexed on 2011/11/25 18:03 UTC
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Filed under:

php

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ios

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push

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polling

I'm looking to add push notifications to one of my iOS apps. The app is a client for a website which doesn't offer push notifications.

What I've come up with so far:

App sends a message to home server when transitioning to background, asking the server to start polling the website for the logged in user.
The home server starts a new process to poll for that user. Polling happens every so many seconds / minutes.
When the user returns to the iOS app, the app sends a message to the home server to stop polling.
The home server kills the process polling for the user.
Repeat.

The problem is that this soon becomes stupid: 100s of users means 100s of different processes. It's just not scalable in the slighest.

What I've written so far is in PHP, using CURL to do the polling and I started with PHP a few days ago, so maybe I'm missing something obvious that could help me with this.

Some advice would be great.

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