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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.)
- river.