I am using Drupalchat for my application. The issue is that my application getting very much slow down after put this chat system. I think the problem will be due to Ajax, it's keep on polling to the server for frequently to check the chat messages(incoming or outgoing). How to fix this issue to fasten my application ?
Also I am curious about how the facebook and gmail chat systems are working in general?
AJAX chats are pretty resource hungry by nature when running on Apache, so there are no easy configuration switches that will instantly give you better performance, I'm afraid.
The big difference between chat implementations is that GMail and Facebook uses a different backend, more suitable for AJAX polling / push. The node.js backend for Drupalchat might be able to help you in that regard. If I were writing my own chat from scratch, I'd probably try out http://www.ape-project.org/ which seems to be pretty good featurewise.
The problem with the drupal chat application is the client-side javascript. With a 100+ chatters, it slows down terribly and causes a very poor user experience. We tried this even using their paid service- but it just couldn't keep up.
The paid service of DrupalChat module has been updated to fix this issue. Earlier if you had high number of concurrent users, then the online chat list used to fluctuate a lot causing client side issue as browsers couldn't keep up with such high rate of data flow. This has been now been fixed by updating online user list continually instead of instantaneously. Please do give it a try now. Thanks!
