Polling is a way for one system to find out whether something has changed by asking, over and over, at a set rhythm. Instead of being told the moment new data appears, the system checks every minute, every hour or whatever interval you choose, and acts only when it finds something new.
Picture a child in the back of the car asking ‘are we there yet?’ every two minutes. The child has no way of knowing when you arrive, so they keep checking. That is polling. It works, but most of the questions return a ‘no’, which is a little wasted effort. The alternative is to be notified the instant you arrive, which is what webhooks do.
Polling is popular because it is reliable and works even when the source system cannot push updates to you. Many tools use a polling trigger to start a workflow: check a folder, a database or an API on a schedule, and fire when something appears. The trade-off is always the same, faster checks give fresher data but use more resources.
There is a practical ceiling, too. Many APIs limit how often you may call them, so polling every few seconds can hit a rate limit and get you blocked, while polling once a day may miss something time-sensitive. The skill is matching the interval to how quickly the data actually changes and how fast anyone needs to know. A stock feed and a monthly invoice export sit at opposite ends of that scale.
At TopDevs we use polling when a system has no other way to share changes, and we tune the interval so your data stays fresh without hammering the source.
