OT: Chat server

[Paul Rubin]

hungjunglu at yahoo.com (Hung Jung Lu) writes:
> > Why?  IRC seems a lot better for chatting.
> 
> Perhaps this helps a little bit:
> 
> http://www.jabber.org/about/overview.php

All I see in there is a bunch of buzzwords.  I'm unimpressed with most
buzzwords, including "XML".  Can you give a brief technical
description of how Jabber works and how it's different from IRC?
Right now I hang out on an IRC network (Undernet) that has hundreds of
thousands of users chatting in real time.  For example, #linux has a
couple hundred users in 20 different countries, all blabbing away
without too much lag most of the time.  How well can Jabber scale to
that kind of load?