Posted by: wth182
It would strain weak connections, so it would have to be an option.Compared to manually refreshing as you do now? No. Absolutely not.
If you load a page in a topic which has 20 replies on it, then refresh to load another reply, you're loading 21 replies in the one request.
If you load a page in a topic with has 20 replies on it, then have a mechanism running which polls the server for more posts every so often, you're only loading those extra posts and not the entire page in the request because there is a focus on only loading the relevant data (see: JSON, XML, YAML, etc...) rather than the data, page structure, scripts, stylesheets, images, and other objects (especially if they're not cached).
In an ideal situation, an "automatically refreshing" page is almost always going to be far less taxing on the client and server than an "F5 refresh".