[taylorbuley]

Think of it like an HTTP request, except a two-way and very long-lived. Not too unlike Comet except with a secure-by-design approach. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_(programming)

[kevinfat]

I've never dealt with Comet. I need the long detailed answer for complete noobs.

[jacobolus]

The old version of that wikipedia article had a bit more background explanation: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Comet_%28programmi...

[kevinfat]

If I am understanding correctly the suggestion is to have a distributed hash table that any backend can lookup to find the other backend it should forward to. And since the distributed hash table is critically important persistent data I'm assuming that using something like Memcached is not a good idea? What would be advisable instead?