[OpenLayers-Users] Updating Data: Comet, Push, or What?

[Michael]

Greetings Mappers!

I've built a trans-pacific charting application intended to be used for 
near real-time sailboat tracking.

I want to update positions without users having to press "refresh."  
While a loop fetching data and updating works for that purpose, we 
expect, from prior experience, around 90k viewers a day during the 
actual race (July 2012).  Data will consist of around 70 new points, 
plus some social networking links, per hour.

It seems that the "long polling" method or, worse, looped queries, can 
lead to server overload.  Web searches keep leading me to Comet and Ape, 
but it seems that nobody has done any work on these since 2009.

Can someone in the community enlighten me on what the best thinking is 
for updating the data on the clients efficiently?  Has the field been 
taken over by mixed commercial enterprises like Lightstreamer?  I'd sure 
like to stay 100% open source.

Michael

p.s:  Simulation at http://pacificcup.org/OpenLayers/trackup.php
A server is set to trickle data out every minute or so.  You'll need to 
pick the boat from the menu at the left.

m