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Polling - CI/CD Glossary Definition

Polling: Polling is repeatedly asking a service whether something changed on a fixed interval, as opposed to being notified by a webhook.

Polling is repeatedly asking a service whether something changed on a fixed interval, as opposed to being notified by a webhook.

Polling trades latency and wasted requests for simplicity: no public endpoint is needed, but you learn about changes only as often as you check.

In CI

A CI agent that polls the API every 60 seconds adds up to 60 seconds of latency per build and burns API rate limit even when nothing changed. Webhooks remove both problems where you can host a receiver.

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