Socket.io disconnect with ping timeout randomly

[jitendrapawar]

we have a real time chat application, that uses socket.io, node.js, mongodb etc. Chat is working very fine except one issue & that is as follows

Some time in between while chatting user are getting disconnected with ping timeout. As I checked there was no problem with internet connection & also there is no logs on re-connection attempts. It directly gets disconnected.

OS - Ubuntu 14.04/AWS EC2
socket.io version on server - 1.6.0
Node version - v0.10.25

Please let us know what could be the problem. Also let me know if you need any other details

[dashcraft]

Have you tried listening to any emitted error events?
Here is a stack overflow article that contains a list of common events emitted by the socket..

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/24224287/list-of-socket-io-events

[avihaym]

I have the same problem did you figure this out ?

[darrachequesne]

@jitendrapawar are you able to reproduce consistently?

[jitendrapawar]

No it's not repeatedly, it's randomly getting disconnected with ping timeout.

…

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[darrachequesne]

• Do you send binary data? (Support for sending big messages #2666)
• Does it timeout after a given delay (could be proxy-related)?
• Is it related to a given browser?
• Are they properly reconnecting after the ping timeout?

[arctelix]

Same issue here. No other errors are emitted. Seems to be totally random.

[chengsu]

I disable the network, and enable it immediately. About 1 minute later, the server gets a 'ping timeout' problem.

[plh97]

  pingInterval: 25000,
  pingTimeout: 60000,

author said that: a client may have to wait up to pingTimeout + pingInterval ms before getting a disconnect event.
but i found while i F5 the webpage , i will get a new socket.id, am i disconnected ????i refresh my page less than 1s,
i can;t found this how to work

[jstelz]

I have just come across this issue as well. Our app has run fine without these disconnects for over a year, but now experiencing random disconnects. In debug, reason for disconnect is "ping timeout" and clients seem to have no issue reconnecting.

The only thing I can possibly narrow it down to so far is a new version of Google Chrome. Chrome 63 seems to have no issues, but users on 64 are the ones experiencing the disconnects and I have no idea why

[vladluca]

I'm facing the exact same problem and I'm on Chrome 63 @jstelz. Does anyone found the problem or a solution?

[darrachequesne]

That may be linked to #5082.

[sirudog]

@darrachequesne In my case it is definitely linked to the issue of client-side timers throttled in background tabs (at least in chrome, I have not yet tested it in other browsers).
I see the same symptoms as mentioned above by the others and it is very easy to reproduce. I just have to start my web app, make sure it connects, and open another tab to force my app running in the background. Eventually the timers will be throttled by chrome resulting in ping timeouts, which in the end will make the server disconnect my app as it thinks the app is not alive anymore.
There is one possible way of disabling this throttling in chrome => https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/80233-enable-disable-google-chrome-background-tab-throttling-windows.html
But this is not perfect and sometimes not even applicable. Probably the only good solution would be what was also done in primus lib: to Reverse the direction of ping/pong messages (primus/primus#534)
This seems a rather big refactoring in engine.io affecting both server and client libs though...

[darrachequesne]

@sirudog well, that's quite a big breaking change! I think we'll have to do that though...

[Salzian]

I have this problem with a game I'm working on.

When I set the server to
pingInterval: 1000, pingTimeout: 500
my client sends out about every second a ping timeout and reconnects.

When I set the server to
pingInterval: 500, pingTimeout: 1000
I don't get timeouts but the server never detects a disconnect.