Periodic Partial refresh

Hi all

here is  the situation

i have a master page with notifications (New Mail,New Fiend Request ,......)

i need to make a periodic refresh for these controls (Link Buttons with JavaScript onclientclick to open the new mail ,... )

so that the count is refreshed

i tried putting them inside update panel with timer and user timer tick for refresh

i turn to be a wrong approach the timer refresh the hole page  every 1 second 

is very resource consuming after  a  while the server give OutOfMemoryException

so

is there a better approach to really refresh only these controls (javascript,jQuery,ajax, .. )

thank you all

sorry for the long message