Building a Sub-100ms Live Odds Ticker: REST vs WebSocket vs Webhooks Compared
If you've ever built a live odds screen, you know the feeling. The price on your page says 1.91, the bookmaker's site says 1.85, and a user is already screenshotting it for your support inbox. Live odds are one of the least forgiving data types you can display. A goal, a red card or a break of serve can move a line within a second. Whether your ticker feels instant or broken depends less on your…
In this guide, we explore three methods for delivering live odds data to a ticker: REST polling, WebSocket streaming, and Webhooks. We compare these methods based on latency, cost, complexity, and failure modes, and provide a reconnect-safe client that can be reused in production. The guide uses the Orbistats Odds API as an example, as it supports all three delivery methods through a normalized schema.
The guide also emphasizes the importance of understanding the various factors that contribute to the sub-100ms goal, including network distance, TLS handshakes, JSON parsing, and rendering.
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