Correct way to do node long polling

Question

Correct way to do node long polling

Seems there's a lot of discussion about how to do this but I haven't found any concrete examples. My node application is accessing a RESTful API that is just going to pass through to a database. my initial solution is this

function getRecord() {
    var req = https.request(options, function(res){
        res.on('data', function(data) {
            var record = JSON.parse(data.toString('utf-8'));
            //do some database things then do it all over
            getRecord();
        });
    });
    req.write(queryString);
    req.end();
}

This accomplishes what I want. I'm going to keep getting new records from the API, but I'm not sure if this is the best approach to doing what I want.

javascript
node.js
long-polling

Answer 1

One (especially favorable) alternative is to switch to a bus architecture with a message server such as RabbitMQ.

You would need to either control the API or have an API that you can register callbacks with.

Long polling is a strategy that can degrade performance and bloat logs quite quickly. Event driven methods, like I've listed above, are much preferred if its a possibility. And, unlike long polling, event driven strategies don't introduce any latency. So if latency is a concern, the more frequent you poll, the more it will degrade performance and bloat logs.