The Comparison Of New Web Communication Method WebSocket With Traditional Methods

The Internet has become an indispensable part of human life in the rapidly growing information age. In response to this demand the number of web-based applications is increasing as well. Web-based applications run in two parts, one on the client and other on the server side. Client-side usually is a web browser, and it requests content from the server. As a result, the server provides the necessary information to the client. To perform the communication between the server and the client, usually Polling, Long Polling and Comet web communication methods are used. In this study, WebSocket, which is the new web communication method, was compared with the Long Polling and Comet methods. For this, a web server and a client computer was used. On the server, three separate web pages were created to accept connection through the WebSocket, Long Polling, and Comet methods. The client computer, which uses a browser to view these web pages, downloads the data on the server into its own memory in pieces at regular intervals. In other experiments, the client computer sends data of different sizes to the server at regular intervals. The comparisons were made based on the bandwidth used. The advantages and disadvantages of the WebSocket method against the Long Polling and Comet methods were presented by comparing the results of the experiments.

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