Real-Time Full Duplex Communication Over the Web : A performance comparison between different web technologies

Abstract: As the web browser becomes an increasingly powerful tool for the average web user, with more features and capabilities being developed constantly, the necessity to determine which features perform better than others in the same area becomes more important. This thesis investigates the performance of three separate technologies used to achieve full-duplex real time communication over the web: short polling using Ajax, server-sent events and the WebSocket protocol. An experiment was conducted measuring the performance over three custom-built web applications (one per technology being tested), comparing latency and number of HTTP requests over 100 messages being sent through the application. Additionally, the latency measurements were made over three separate network conditions. The experiment results suggest the WebSocket protocol outperforms both short polling using Ajax and server-sent events by large margins, varying slightly depending on network conditions.