Systems and methods for automatically polling for data changes in an on-demand database service environment. A polling server communicates with application servers and client systems. Application servers send update messages to the polling server identifying which database objects have been updated, and client systems communicate with the polling server on a regular basis, rather than with the application server, to determine whether updates to a data object may have been made. When it has been determined that an update may have been made, the client system then sends a refresh request to the application server to request an update to the data object, thereby controlling (e.g., reducing) the number of refresh requests sent to the application server.