Well, it's not that meaningless. Comet is basically long polling; those connections aren't really doing much of anything until something turns up on the back en

Well, it's not that meaningless. Comet is basically long polling; those connections aren't really doing much of anything until something turns up on the back end to be pushed down them, at which point the connection is usually closed and then re-requested by the client. Maybe with the occasional ping, I've seen some people do that too. How much memory and CPU is required to simply hold open the connection and sit there is definitely of interest to people. Of course, I'd like to see real world tests too, but that might be rather difficult to pull off without specially written, extremely efficient code on the test side.