I wouldn't call it polling. Angular does dirty checking at the right moment. After you bootstrap your app, nothing happens, unless: - user interacts (DOM even

I wouldn't call it polling. Angular does dirty checking at the right moment. After you bootstrap your app, nothing happens, unless: - user interacts (DOM event is fired) - response from server is back (xhr callback) - setTimeout fires - couple of other minor async stuff So you only need to dirty check when some of these events occur and that's exactly what Angular does. Check out scope.$digest method, that's where all this stuff happens.