Software Design

Long Polling vs Short Polling Network Flows

UML Sequence Diagrams · made in Skemio

Sequence diagram contrasting short polling with empty returns against long polling holding a request open until an asynchronous job event resolves.

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What it shows

Short polling spams fixed interval GETs, wasting bandwidth on empty data
Long polling holds requests open until fresh data arrives or timeout occurs
Long polling cuts round trips drastically but ties up server worker threads

The takeaway

Choose long polling for simple event notifications without full WebSocket overhead.

#SystemDesign,#Polling,#BackendEngineering,#APIDesign,#WebDev,#Architecture

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