Telegram Bot Webhooks vs Long Polling: Latency Benchmark & Concurrency Guide

When designing a Telegram bot, one of your primary architectural decisions is selecting how your application receives updates from Telegram's servers: Long Polling or Webhooks.

How Long Polling Works

In long polling, your bot sends an outbound HTTP request (getUpdates) to Telegram. If no messages have arrived, Telegram holds the connection open for up to 30 seconds. As soon as a user texts your bot, Telegram responds with the payload and your bot immediately establishes the next poll.

• Pros: Zero public IP or SSL certificate needed; runs behind any firewall or NAT; super easy local debugging.
• Cons: Constant outbound HTTP traffic; can introduce 50-100ms latency on slow networks.

How Webhooks Work

In a webhook configuration, your bot acts as an HTTP web server (e.g., using FastAPI, Flask, or Aiohttp). Whenever an event occurs on Telegram, Telegram's servers make an inbound HTTPS POST request directly to your public URL.

• Pros: Ultra-fast (sub-20ms delivery); event-driven; saves bandwidth when bot is quiet.
• Cons: Requires a public domain with valid SSL certificate (Telegram rejects self-signed certs unless manually uploaded); requires handling SSL handshakes and port forwarding.

Which One Should You Choose?

For 90% of bots (under 100,000 updates per day), Long Polling on BotifyHost is faster, simpler, and less error-prone. Because BotifyHost servers reside directly on high-speed European and Asian fiber backbones adjacent to Telegram datacenters, long polling ping times remain consistently under 15ms.