Team Cuts Server Load 90% by Replacing 5-Second Polling with WebSocket Push

A development team overhauled their status dashboard after 400 concurrent clients polling every five seconds generated 80 requests per second, most of which returned no new data. They migrated from a pull-based polling model to a server-pushed WebSocket architecture, ensuring status changes triggered real-time events rather than waiting for the next scheduled check. Before the switch was viable, engineers had to instrument previously unmarked code paths — such as bulk database cleanup jobs — to properly emit status-change events. A fallback to 60-second polling was built in for clients behind corporate proxies that struggle with persistent WebSocket connections, affecting under 3% of users. The result was a roughly 90% drop in endpoint traffic, while clients also gained faster status updates since changes are now delivered the moment they occur.