Exactly! Keeping all of those stateful connections open is a much bigger issue than loadbalancing simple HTTP polls (that you could cache super aggressively). I

Exactly! Keeping all of those stateful connections open is a much bigger issue than loadbalancing simple HTTP polls (that you could cache super aggressively). I think this is what this blog post really misses and shows that they have not much of a clue how to operate things at a worldwide scale.