Polling Causing Excessive API Calls in Cursor-Built App

Your Cursor-generated application uses client-side polling (setInterval with fetch) to check for updates, but the polling is far too aggressive. Your API is receiving thousands of unnecessary requests per minute, driving up server costs, hitting rate limits, and degrading performance for all users.

Cursor often generates polling as the simplest way to achieve "real-time" updates — a setInterval that calls the API every 1-2 seconds. This works fine with one user in development, but in production with hundreds or thousands of concurrent users, each polling at 1-second intervals, the request volume becomes unsustainable. A seemingly innocent feature like checking for new notifications can generate millions of API calls per day.

The problem compounds because the polling continues even when the browser tab is in the background, the user is idle, or there's no new data to fetch, wasting bandwidth and battery on mobile devices.