Hmm...
Your experiment literally misses the entire point of using WebSockets over AJAX.
Let me know when your AJAX API is capable of handling a million concurrent connections while responding to 20,000 requests per second.
AJAX starts sucking when scaling becomes an issue; WebSockets beat AJAX at both small AND large scales, and something like socket.io (or a node.js server) is incredibly easy to set up... so why not do it?
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Why not? Because 20,000 requests per second is extremely rare.
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Hmm... Your experiment literally misses the entire point of using WebSockets over AJAX. Let me know when your AJAX API is capable of handling a million concurrent connections while responding to 20,000 requests per second. AJAX starts sucking when scaling becomes an issue; WebSockets beat AJAX at both small AND large scales, and something like socket.io (or a node.js server) is incredibly easy to set up... so why not do it?