<i>&gt; Why does everyone run to websockets even when they only need server-to-client pushing? Probably because it&#x27;s difficult to get longpolling right.</i><p>Definitely not. Longpolling adds a huge amount of overhead when messages are sent relatively frequently. For each longpoll request, the client needs to send all the headers and cookies every time. Each response includes all headers and connection setup. A websocket connection has zero overhead after the initial http upgrade. If you have websocket available, you should always prefer websocket to long polling. In most cases where websocket would be blocked by infrastructure, long polling would be forced to retry extremely quickly because of forced timeout.