For building a simplistic live search system, I trying to decide whether to use Websockets or Ajax. Implementation wise, for every letter the user types (or maybe every 0.5 seconds), a database query will be run against the input/typed text and some comparisons will be made on the query output to return the top 5-10 results to the user device.

I am very familiar with Ajax and learning websockets will be a good exercise, if it turns out to be the better tech to use. But as I am not presently qualified to run benchmarking tests with both, I would appreciate any guidance on this. Will the connection overhead of Ajax make a significant enough difference in this case? Are there any other factors that might matter?

For building a simplistic live search system, I trying to decide whether to use Websockets or Ajax. Implementation wise, for every letter the user types (or maybe every 0.5 seconds), a database query will be run against the input/typed text and some comparisons will be made on the query output to return the top 5-10 results to the user device.

I am very familiar with Ajax and learning Websockets will be a good exercise, if it turns out to be the better tech to use. But as I am not presently qualified to run benchmarking tests with both, I would appreciate any guidance on this. Will the connection overhead of Ajax make a significant enough difference in this case? Are there any other factors that might matter?