My point to not wanting to refresh the HTML page is to keep from having a new process started every 5 seconds by every user. Those add up fast. However, I also understand that keeping one process going (and opening/closing the database every few seconds) for every user adds up to a lot of system resources.

Another reason for wanting to do this is so that the user doesn't get any flashing on their screen from the script reloading all the time. Smooth, continuous output looks pretty cool.

Any ideas or comments on this?