I only skimmed the article, but my understanding was that they're using long polling to connect the clients to the message queue. In that case, using node.js a

I only skimmed the article, but my understanding was that they're using long polling to connect the clients to the message queue. In that case, using node.js and socket.io (as swanson suggested) could considerably reduce the number of concurrent connections since clients with WebSocket or Flash support wouldn't need to hold connections open waiting on publish events. That approach isn't unique to node.js, of course, but the combination of node.js and socket.io would be a valid way to improve scalability [0, Fig. 3] of most any app relying on long polling. [0] http://websocket.org/quantum.html http://websocket.org/quantum.html