Chat Refreshing

[Anon]

I am trying to get a decent chat room going using PHP4, my trouble right now is refreshing the page, I am using a meta refresh, the conversation is being saved to a text file. Does PHP offer a better way of updating the chat room than meta refresh? Would using MySQL be a better approach? Anyone have any advice or a better solution?
Thanks in Advance,
Jim

[Anon]

If anyone can think of something for this, I would also be grateful...

you can write it as a php file that never dies, set the timeout to unlimited and keep checking, sleeping, and flushing using flush() -- but when I try to run it on my dev webserver (Personal Web Sever) it always dies if more than 1 person is in chat.. I think because its not multithreaded....

anyway, thats one way to do it. If anyone has another idea, please let me know.

[nccsoft]

My system
Dual PIII-650
1G Ram
18G HD SCSI

FreeBSD 4.2
Apache 1.3.19
PHP 4.0.4pl1
Mysql 3.23.33

I am try flush() in my chat room.
but I find a problem.
My chat room always over 600 user online.
my website is very slow.
I have set apache maxclient=512.
because apache over 500 process.
apache is eat memory.

If anyone has another idea, please let me know.

brian wrote:

If anyone can think of something for this, I would also be grateful...

you can write it as a php file that never dies, set the timeout to unlimited and keep checking, sleeping, and flushing using flush() -- but when I try to run it on my dev webserver (Personal Web Sever) it always dies if more than 1 person is in chat.. I think because its not multithreaded....

anyway, thats one way to do it. If anyone has another idea, please let me know.