Long-Lived Connections and Streaming Push: Standardizing SSE / WebSocket Implementations to Replace Inefficient Polling
In web systems, there is a type of requirement that is especially prone to being implemented by AI as “it runs, but it’s dumb”: Frontend: Ask the server every 1 second "Is the task done?" Server: "No." Ask again 1 second later: "Is it done?" This approach is called: Polling Querying a status occasionally is fine, but for real-time scenarios such as AI streaming responses, OCR progress, document parsing, knowledge base construction, and background task status, high-frequency polling generates a large number of useless requests. A more appropriate solution is usually: SSE (Server-Sent Events) Or: WebSocket — a full-duplex, long-lived connection protocol The core idea boils down to one sentence: Don’t make the client keep asking “Got any message yet?” — let the server push messages proactively when there is something new. ...