My FeedDiscussionsHeadless CMS
New
Sign in
Log inSign up
Learn more about Hashnode Headless CMSHashnode Headless CMS
Collaborate seamlessly with Hashnode Headless CMS for Enterprise.
Upgrade ✨Learn more

Real Time Communications - How Real Time is Real Time?

TheSheriff's photo
TheSheriff
·Sep 9, 2016

So, as a couple of you know I've been posting questions about Mutation Observers. After understand those, now comes the ultimate question - How real time should RTC be? To me Real Time means real time, i.e. as soon as it happens it's sent somewhere and acted upon almost instantly - network dependent. And the only other dependency should be execution time.

However, there's one problem with this; Consider the case, if I take mutation observers and say I have a web page with a canvas overlay that can be drawn on and I've filtered the mutation observer to listen for those changes. Now, ever time the cursor is moved, it logs an event with (x,y) + other element/style info.
If I decide I want to go down the route of RTC then the network will get clogged up with 100's of requests per session. OR do I debounce/rate limit the number of data transfer connections and therefore not really hold up to the true meaning of RTC ?

Is there a different angle I should be looking at this from?
Could I find a middle ground such as debounce for 50ms?

tl;dr Real time experience vs network useage, how do i choose? What are peoples thoughts and experiences with RTC?