Not to pedal my own wares, but... ;)

http://axod.blogspot.com/2009/12/websocket-some-numbers.html

Also a caveat followup - websocket don't play nice with some proxies/nat/firewall setups. Either need https, or fallback on comet.

I don't want to pry, but I'm really curious - do you work full-time on Mibbit, or is it a side project for you?

Reasonably full-time now, my brother is pretty much full-time on it now also (Not abstractbill, our older bro). Things are going well :)

I think it's always good to have a few things on the go though, so I doubt I'd ever be 'full-time' on any one thing ;)

It will since you don't need to open and close connections all the time. I can't estimate at what degree, but I think the communication will be much faster since currently some time is used to re-create connections.

Also, once the handshake is done, no back-and-forth of TCP/IP headers (which generate a lot of needless bandwidth).