Real-Time Push - ScenarioX

1. What exactly is Real-Time Push?

Your ASP.NET Core API tracks a value that changes occasionally, a live location or a status. A mobile app polls a GET endpoint every 2 seconds just to check for updates.

As your active mobile clients grow into the thousands, most of those requests come back with the exact same value as before, because the underlying value changes far less often than every 2 seconds. Your API layer starts struggling under the request volume, long before the real rate of change should be causing any trouble at all.

Thousands of clients asking on a fixed schedule cost far more than the handful of changes they are actually waiting for. That's exactly what real-time push avoids.

2. How would you fix it in .NET?

Real-time push flips the direction entirely: open a persistent connection from the client to the server using SignalR, which runs over WebSockets where available and falls back automatically where it isn't. When the underlying value changes, the server pushes that update down every open connection that needs it, instead of waiting to be asked, and the client's polling loop goes away entirely.

Use: Microsoft.AspNetCore.SignalR

Push what changed, don't answer the same question over and over.

3. How can you visualize it in everyday terms?

A doorbell rings the moment someone is actually at the door. Nobody stands there opening it every few seconds just in case.

Polling is walking to the door every few seconds to check. A doorbell is the door telling you the moment it matters.

A doorbell rings once; someone checking the door keeps checking anyway.