How would i...?

webmaster66

I have a working chat room client. However it has problems with lag on slow computers. This is why. There are two frames. One frame sends the message to a .txt file. The other is a php file that gets the contents of the .txt file. In order to make it so you can get the messages other people type. I used the meta refresh tag to refresh every 5 seconds. I thought this was fine until i used an old computer. Can any body think of a way that i can check to see if the text file has been updated. Then, if it has been updated, (instead of refreshing the page) just add the new content??? I cant think of a way to acopmlish this. Any help???

tbbd

The only thing that I can think of right offhand is use something like file_get_contents and set it up to where it would compare the file contents of old posts to new posts...but even if you did that, I would think that it would be even slower because you would still have to reload the page to parse the code to do the compare, then if it different, then echo the contents of the file.

hopefully somebody else may have a better 🙂 idea

Magfersile

You said that your code writes the chat messages into a txt file. . . Why? I would think that it would be much easier to set up a database for the chat. That way, you could give each message in the table a unique id number, and then all you would have to do is write some simple code that would store the last message id in a session variable or something and then compare any new message id with the previous id and if it is greater, then refresh your frame that displays the messages. Let me know if this helps.

bradgrafelman

I think the real solution you're looking for here is purely client-side: AJAX.

AJAX can send a "heartbeat" every second or so to see if a new message has been posted (storing the last message's ID is a good way to do this). If so, it can retrieve the data and manipulate the page without a full refresh.

NogDog

Umm . . . I'd just like to point out that this is a 1-1/2 year old thread, and the original poster has not had any forum activity since then, so it's probably a waste of time trying to suggest changes to him/her.

bradgrafelman

squint Aargh! You tricked me Magfersile. 🙁

Magfersile

hahaha! Twas my plan the whole time... take that bradgrafelman! Just kidding. Sorry about that. I forgot that I was searching the forum for something and I guess I got excited when I thought that I might actually have a solution for someone that I posted without considering that it was an old post... 🙂