Instead of "long polling" (or a different way to have long polling) is to use the HTML5's server sent events (http://www.w3.org/TR/eventsource/) See here for examples: http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/eventsource/basics/

I have implemented such a functionality for real time monitoring using gevent and works extremely well. This HTML5 feature is supported in recent versions of Chrome, Opera, and Safari and in the beta versions of Firefox, but not in any version of IE: http://caniuse.com/#feat=eventsource