> Ilmari Karonen:
>> In principle, it should also be possible to make a true live Wikimedia
>> edit counter: all you'd need to do is subscribe to the IRC RecentChanges
>> feed and condense it down to some suitably low-bandwidth, low-latency
>> format for transmitting to the browser. I'm not sure how practical that
>> would be with plain old AJAX, though (you really don't want to make a
>> new request for every edit), but Java or Flash or something like that
>> ought to handle it fine.
>
> I did something similar to this in JS alone:
>
> <
http://toolserver.org/~river/recentchanges/>
>
> It requires 1 request per second to update, but the backend is a C++
> FastCGI and the database query is trivial, so the requests create no
> noticeable load. I imagine it should be fairly simple to do something
> similar for a plain number-of-edits counter. (You would only need to
> return number of edits, rather than the edits themselves, so a little
> less bandwidth would be used.)