Long-Lived Connections and Streaming Push: Standardizing SSE / WebSocket Implementations to Replace Inefficient Polling

Sun, 16 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Streaming Push on Interesting AI

Long-Lived Connections and Streaming Push: Standardizing SSE / WebSocket Implementations to Replace Inefficient Polling