Ajax chat allowed?

[Rolus]

Im working on a new site design (for a gaming clan) and i've been thinking of adding a cool little gmail-like chatbox. I was thinking of using AJAX and a php file for this but that means that php file will need to be run about once every second, mayb once every 2 seconds (any longer would get annoying) continuously. However i dont have a clue how much bandwidth that takes. Am i allowed to do this and do you have any guidelines for this?

Thx in advance

 

[Russ]

couple of suggestions, actually 5 seconds would be great.. But, i'd prefer if you used something else, like irc.. if you want to check it out, go over to http://rpope904.x10hosting.com/irc and check that out, we could do something similar for you.

 

[Rolus]

I've thought about IRC too, but you end up with some premade cgi client or a java applet. I've been looking at quite a few in the past and none of those seems to fit what i had in mind. That leaves me with either making my own or the ajax thingy... Ill first try to find some information on making building an IRC client, else ill go with the 5 second delay ajax.
Edit:
I've been reading a bit and it seems to be possible with perl. I dont have any experience with perl but i've looked at some tutorials and it seems to be very much like php so learning it should not be a problem. Apperently 2 perl module exists called Net::IRC and POE::Component::IRC that more or less do the same. I found a script that reads out all modules installed on the server but i didnt find either of them. Is there anyway to install those modules?