title: Is there a super-high-load (Ajax) chat script out there?
body: <p>For a pet project, I have been looking for a web chat script capable of running potentially <em>tens of thousands of users</em> simultaneously. I don't want to use any kind of applet or browser extension, so on the client side, it should be simple Ajax. On the server side I'm pretty much open to anything.</p>
  
  <p>I'm not looking for bells and whistles, a simple text-only chat is more than enough, as long as it supports a number of 'channels' or 'rooms' simultaneously, and a very large number of users.</p>
  
  <p>When I first started researching the chat scripts out there, it seemed like the only viable option was to run an IRC server and just build a web interface on top of that. I know I could get good performance and stability with that setup, but could I get better performance by using something else?</p>
  
  <p>Any ideas?</p>