I don't use WebSockets mostly because of general lack of support and stability in the frameworks I use and clients I want to support. I typically use an in mem

I don't use WebSockets mostly because of general lack of support and stability in the frameworks I use and clients I want to support. I typically use an in memory buffer server side of events generated to send down, the client polls (as rapidly as desired, sometimes on the minutes time frame, sometimes on the seconds) passing up the last package ID it received (or nothing if it's just starting up). The server from memory sends back all messages it has as the delta. This combined with keep-alive has worked rather well. I would not recommend this for mobile users or users who would be on metered connections, but the behavior of the client is easy to implement using ajax and throttling on the javascript side. By it's nature it automatically recovers from network drops or reroutes with no additional logic.