How does the refresh work ?

[BlueScreenJunky]

Hi there, and first of all congratulations to the devs for that awesome script, I'm really impressed.

Now I'm very curious as to how it works, since I found phpFreeChat while searching for inspiration to make my own little ajax chat for my website. I could use phpFreeChat, but what I need is much more simple than that (it would be more of a dynamic shoutbox actually), and I like to do everything by myself, even if I know it will never be as good.

Anyway, I could really use a little help on the refresh thingy. I was thinking of adding a line to a text file (plain text or xml) everytime someone sends a message and using xmlhttprequest to reload this file every x milliseconds (where 10 < x < 1000). But I'm affraid this would be extremely slow, and phpFreeChat seems too responsive to work that way, so I guess there must be a smarter way ^^;
So I'd be very thankful if the devs or someone familiar with phpFreeChat could point me in the right direction. =)

Thanx.



edit : Nevermind, I did it my way and it seems to work ok. It probably wastes some bandwidth, but saves some CPU time.

[phpfreechat]

Currently, phpfreechat uses simple periodical refreshes.
By default each 5 seconds.