Socket.io allows you to use heartbeats to "check the health of Socket.IO connections." What exactly are heartbeats and why should or shouldn't I use them?
A heartbeat is a small message sent from a client to a server (or from a server to a client and back to the server) at periodic intervals to confirm that the client is still around and active.
For example, if you have a Node.js app serving a chat room, and a user doesn't say anything for many minutes, there's no way to tell if they're really still connected. By sending a hearbeat at a predetermined interval (say, every 15 seconds), the client informs the server that it's still there. If it's been e.g. 20 seconds since the server's gotten a heartbeat from a client, it's likely been disconnected.
This is necessary because you cannot be guaranteed a clean connection termination over TCP--if a client crashes, or something else happens, you won't receive the termination packets from the client, and the server won't know that the client has disconnected. Furthermore, Socket.IO supports various other mechanisms (other than TCP sockets) to transfer data, and in these cases the client won't (or can't) send a termination message to the server.
By default, a Socket.IO client will send a heartbeat to the server every 15 seconds (heartbeat interval), and if the server hasn't heard from the client in 20 seconds (heartbeat timeout) it will consider the client disconnected.
I can't think of many average use cases where you probably wouldn't want to use heartbeats.
Related
I have a NodeJS app that uses a Server Sent Events (SSE) route to send updates from the server to the client. On my local dev environment, this works great since the client remains connected to the SSE route at all times and tries to reconnect immediately if it is disconnected.
However, once I deployed my app to Heroku, it all went awry. Within a few seconds of not sending any data over the SSE route, I get a 503 Service Unavailable error on the client side and the client loses its connection to server due to which it is unable to receive any more real time updates. Looking at the Heroku server logs, it was giving me a H12 Request Timeout error.
On some further research, I came across this article on the Heroku website:
If you’re sending a streaming response, such as with server-sent
events, you’ll need to detect when the client has hung up, and make
sure your app server closes the connection promptly. If the server
keeps the connection open for 55 seconds without sending any data,
you’ll see a request timeout.
However, it does not mention how to solve the issue.
Is there a way to set the timeout to infinity?
Or does this mean I have to keep sending heartbeats from my server to client just to keep the SSE route connection alive? This seems tedious and unnecessary since I want to keep the connection alive at all times.
Received this from Heroku:
I wish I had better news for you but unfortunately, there's nothing
you can do to avoid this other than sending a ping within every 55
seconds to keep the SSE persistent.
Heartbeat is the only way to keep an SSE route alive with Heroku unfortunately.
On the Server side for websockets there is already an ping/pong implementation where the server sends a ping and client replies with a pong to let the server node whether a client is connected or not. But there isn't something implemented in reverse to let the client know if the server is still connected to them.
There are two ways to go about this I have read:
Every client sends a message to server every x seconds and whenever
an error is thrown when sending, that means the server is down, so
reconnect.
Server sends a message to every client every x seconds, the client receives this message and updates a variable on the client, and on the client side you have a thread that constantly checks every x seconds which checks if this variable has changed, if it hasn't in a while it means it hasn't received a message from the server and you can assume the server is down so reestablish a connection.
You can achieve trying to figure out on client side whether the server is still online using either methods. The first one you'll be sending traffic to the server whereas the second one you'll be sending traffic out of the server. Both seem easy enough to implement but I'm not so sure which is the better way in terms of being the more efficient/cost effective.
Server upload speeds are higher than client upload speeds, but server CPUs are an expensive resource while client CPUs are relatively cheap. Unloading logic onto the client is a more cost-effective approach...
Having said that, servers must implement this specific logic (actually, all ping/timeout logic), otherwise they might be left with "half-open" sockets that drain resources but aren't connected to any client.
Remember that sockets (file descriptors) are a limited resource. Not only do they use memory even when no traffic is present, but they prevent new clients from connecting when the resource is maxed out.
Hence, servers must clear out dead sockets, either using timeouts or by implementing ping.
P.S.
I'm not a node.js expert, but this type of logic should be implemented using the Websocket protocol ping rather than by your application. You should probably look into the node.js server / websocket framework and check how to enable ping-ing.
You should set pings to accommodate your specific environment. i.e., if you host on Heroku, than Heroku will implement a timeout of ~55 seconds and your pings should be sent before this timeout occurs.
I have socket.io server in node.js. All connections come through NGINX. The client is written in C# with Quobject/SocketIoClientDotNet library.
The problem is that client receives messages from server only from time to time.
I have logs in node.js code, so the server tries to send messages. Moreover, there are multiple processes with TIME_WAIT state in server (I gat that by netstat) and the number of that processes is equal to number of unsuccessful send attempts by socket.io server.
Otherwise, server always receive messages from clients.
I made nginx settings ("upgrade" headers, etc.) but it didn't help.
I turned off Windows Firewall but it didn't help.
So, I don't know why such situation happens, I don't know where else to look at and I will appreciate any help from community.
I'm using socket.io and nodejs,
I have a server and I use it as my nodeJS server. What I'm trying to do is moving clients according to messages sent as client -> server -> clients
For example; client1 sending a message "MOVE-RIGHT" to server. Server redirecting this message to all clients LIKE "MOVE-RIGHT-CLIENT1" and according to this message, all clients starting to move client1 to the right direction.
The problem is, all clients may have different latency according to their network status. For example, if server->client1 communication happens in 50 ms, server->client2 communication may happen in 250 ms. Therefore, client1 does this job nearly 200 ms earlier. So we can say that these two movements are not synchronized because one of them happens earlier than other ones.
As you know latency between clients and server may be different for each clients, and also it can be different for each message for the same client.
My question is, Which method should I use to synchronize these clients, to do their jobs at the same time. Is there any feature of socket.io or nodejs about this? What would you recommend for me?
For example we have a basic node.js server <-> client comunicaciton.
A basic node.js server who sends each 500ms a message to the only o every one client connected with their respective socket initiated, the client is responding correctly to the heratbeat and receiving all the messages in time. But, imagine the client has a temporal connection lag (without closing socket), cpu overload, etc.. And cannot process nothing during 2secs or more.
In this situation, where goes all those the messages that are not yet received by the client??
They are stored in node? in any buffer or similar?
And viceversa? The client is sending every 500ms a message to the server (the server only listens without responding), but the server has a temporary connection issue or cpu overhead during 2 or 3 secs..
Thanks in advice!! any information or aclaration will be welcomed
Javier
Yes, they are stored in buffers, primarily in buffers provided by the OS kernel. Same thing on the receiving end for connections incoming to a node server.