The channel API really isn't that great. Unlike WebSockets, it's not a bidirectional socket and since it uses http requests to send data to the server, the late

The channel API really isn't that great. Unlike WebSockets, it's not a bidirectional socket and since it uses http requests to send data to the server, the latency great. It's much better than polling, but still not great. You can't reuse channel client IDs so broadcasting a message to all subscribers requires you to keep track of things on the datastore yourself, not terrible, but it could have been made better.