---
title: Show updates as they happen
description: Live chat, scores, and feeds stay fresh over sockets or streams; clients must reconnect after deploys and idle sleep.
---

Ask for live updates, like chat rooms, live scores, and shared feeds, and your builder wires up a live connection. Two-way traffic like chat uses rooms over WebSockets. One-way streams like score tickers use server-sent events.

## Why connections drop

Live connections die on every deploy and when your app sleeps after about 30 minutes idle. Your builder codes the client to reconnect with backoff and re-fetch missed messages from the database.

For one-way streams, the server sends a keep-alive comment every few seconds. Silent streams hit the proxy timeout and cut out.

Cross-request fan-out belongs in [Background jobs](/backend/background-jobs).

For the technical detail, your builder reads [Add realtime rooms](/agents/backend/websockets) and [Stream updates with SSE](/agents/backend/sse).