Is My Code A Performance Killer?

I am showing the value of the timer.php through AJAX in index.php . However I am concern about the performance of this, if it is a server killer if there are 30 people online, and

Solution 1:

Depends on your server specs and number of clients, this could quickly become a server-killer.

The multiple calls to a file every second will quickly put a lot of load for nothing though, so best practice calls for using a javascript timer countdown. I particularly like this one: http://stuntsnippets.com/javascript-countdown/

And for the jQuery implementation:

<scripttype="text/javascript">var myDate = newDate(); //Retrieve actual date
myDate.setTime(this.getTime() + (3600 * 2)); //Add two hours

$(document).ready(function() {
    $("#time").countdown({
        date: myDate.toGMTString(),
        onComplete: function( event ){
            $(this).html("completed");
        },
        leadingZero: true
    });
});
</script><pid="time"class="time"></p>

This should be enough, no more need for PHP calls and the client does everything.

Solution 2:

By setting a setInterval for every second, you are basically saying that for 30 clients, you will be getting roughly 30 txn per second to your php server. Its hard to say its a performance killer outside of just saying you will have to handle 30tps for this simple call. I would first quesiton why you are doing this with a server side script. You could just as easily give the html file a datetime when the page loads and do the countdown with just javascript in the browser.

Solution 3:

I use jQuery Countdown http://keith-wood.name/countdown.html to put a timer on my pages to let the user know when they are going to be logged out of the system due to inactivity.

You can bind a function to the counter expiring event.

http://code.google.com/p/jquery-countdown/ ...Simple example

http://keith-wood.name/countdown.html ...shows off all the bells and whistles...

It can be as simple as the first one or as detailed as the second!

-=Bryan