Rambo_Bill,
I second Jeroen's recommendation for using the website to act as an initiation point for a P2P connection between the players, then having the game client pass time-sensitive notifications (i.e., "Player X has made his move") directly between the clients. Then, you can either have the entire game play out as P2P, or you can use this P2P connection to minimize traffic to and from the web server (if, for example, you want to do server-side validations, or if you want to track scoring and statistics.)
You'll encounter issues with NAT addresses and the like, but it's a far more elegant solution than trying to use HTTP or another query/response-based protocol to pass real-time information.
(In general, the games at Yahoo! and Microsoft do not repeatedly query an HTTP server--rather, they'll communicate through a direct connection to a game server, thus minimizing network traffic. That, and Microsoft and Yahoo! both have more bandwidth than God, which I'm guessing is not the case for you. :] )
I second Jeroen's recommendation for using the website to act as an initiation point for a P2P connection between the players, then having the game client pass time-sensitive notifications (i.e., "Player X has made his move") directly between the clients. Then, you can either have the entire game play out as P2P, or you can use this P2P connection to minimize traffic to and from the web server (if, for example, you want to do server-side validations, or if you want to track scoring and statistics.)
You'll encounter issues with NAT addresses and the like, but it's a far more elegant solution than trying to use HTTP or another query/response-based protocol to pass real-time information.
(In general, the games at Yahoo! and Microsoft do not repeatedly query an HTTP server--rather, they'll communicate through a direct connection to a game server, thus minimizing network traffic. That, and Microsoft and Yahoo! both have more bandwidth than God, which I'm guessing is not the case for you. :] )