title: What is a simple and low-profile way to do push notifications in an ASP.NET MVC app?
body: <p>I need a way for my web application to send push-notifications to the client side. Realtime is not a strong requirement, near-realtime is okay. I don't need anything fancy, just sending a string to the client every now and then, nothing more. What's really important is that the solution must be very simple and low-profile (performance-wise mainly). Could you give me advice on which framework to use?</p>
  
  <p>Many people would say SignalR hands down, but I'm not sure about the performance part. It is not disqualified, I'll tell about my doubts below, and I'm also interested about any insights you may have about this, but the main question stays what I wrote above.</p>
  
  <p>I read <a href="http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/27107/Scalable-COMET-Combined-with-ASP-NET" rel="nofollow">this article</a> recently. What it provides is a long-running request pattern with only a few classes, a little IIS &amp; async magic and nothing more. Even if you have an IIS connection limit of 200, it will barely use up any of those connections. Compared to this, SignalR is as complex and heavy-weight as a nuclear power plant. It comes with half a dozen different DLL's (like OWIN, which I haven't heard about before, and even after a bit of Googling, I can't figure out what it is). The <a href="https://github.com/SignalR/SignalR/wiki/Performance" rel="nofollow">performance wiki page</a> of SignalR starts by suggesting to increase your concurrent request limit to a ridiculous amount. So I'm guessing it's not using the aforementioned "trick". I'm not exactly sure how bad that is, but in the light of that article, it doesn't sound good.</p>