Scalability of push and pull based event notification : A comparison between webhooks and polling

Sammanfattning: Today’s web applications make extensive use of APIs between server and client, or server to server in order to provide new information in the form of events. The question was whether the different methods of procuring events are different in how they scale. This study aims to compare performance between webhooks and polling, the two most commonly used pull and push based methods for event notification when scaling up traffic. The purpose is to create a basis for developers when choosing the method for event notification. The comparison has been developed through measurements of typical indicators of good performance for web applications: CPU usage, memory usage and response time. The tests gave indications that webhooks perform better in most circumstances, but further testing is needed in a more well-defined environment to draw a confident conclusion.