Client gives up on websocket and switches to fallback after a loss of internet connectivity about pusher-js

[pl]

Hi,

We cache successful transport info - it is flushed after 15 minutes or after an unsuccessful attempt using the cached transport. We also disable WebSockets/Flash if there were 2 established connections that closed uncleanly after less than a few minutes (right now 4 minutes, I think).

In other cases, current strategy is:

1. start connecting with WebSockets,
2. wait 2 seconds,
3. if WebSockets haven't connected yet, start connecting using SockJS in parallel.

There are lots of cases this behaviour makes sense. There are proxies that break connections after a longer period, so you will manage to open a WebSocket connection every time, but you'll have to reconnect every minute, which is much worse than being switched to HTTP.

Anyway, for majority of cases you don't experience this behaviour and everything works fine. We will consider upgrading transports on the fly in the future, but we can't implement this reliably for the time being.

In the meantime, we'll be releasing blog posts about current strategy soon, which will give you more details on the strategy and motivations behind it.

[johtso]

Hey, thanks for the detailed info.

Just to be completely clear, I'm testing by switching off the WIFI connection on my laptop for a few seconds and then reenabling it. So, complete loss of connectivity, and then everything back to normal.

So the behaviour I described above is expected under those circumstances?

Looking forward to the blog post with details on the strategy!

[pl]

Yes, this is expected behaviour, it's used to detect bad proxies or anti-virus software, which behave in very similar ways. Normally, you don't experience frequent network disconnections and even if you do, you're probably better off with polling.

We should release the first, more general blog post today and two more detailed in 1 week intervals.

[pl]

Blog posts about connection strategy are here:

http://blog.pusher.com/how-we-built-pusher20-part-1/
http://blog.pusher.com/how-we-built-pusher-js-2-0-part-2-implementation/
http://blog.pusher.com/how-we-built-pusher-js-2-0-part-3-metrics/

I'm closing, since there's no action to be done for this issue.