That is Doing It Wrong, which he'll see when he gets to scale. Real time chat needs real-time systems. Too bad gTalk, Facebook Chat, AIM or MSN Messenger aren't available on the market. The closest is ejabberd, which is nowhere near perfect.
At least he moved away from a database, but the fact that he even considered that means that he did no research up front.
Are you referring to polling vs web sockets or something? A lot of chat systems use polling at scale, Campfire being one of them.
Thanks for the feedback. Plenty of ways to [insert proverb here] and stretch the intellectual curiosity using new tools.
I'm not clear what you mean by realtime systems? It uses Server-Sent Events. Real-time enough for me. The project was more for research and demonstration purposes anyhow.
I created this! thanks for posting guys, let me know what you think!