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Timeouts
========
.. currentmodule:: websockets
Long-lived connections
----------------------
Since the WebSocket protocol is intended for real-time communications over
long-lived connections, it is desirable to ensure that connections don't
break, and if they do, to report the problem quickly.
Connections can drop as a consequence of temporary network connectivity issues,
which are very common, even within data centers.
Furthermore, WebSocket builds on top of HTTP/1.1 where connections are
short-lived, even with ``Connection: keep-alive``. Typically, HTTP/1.1
infrastructure closes idle connections after 30 to 120 seconds.
As a consequence, proxies may terminate WebSocket connections prematurely when
no message was exchanged in 30 seconds.
.. _keepalive:
Keepalive in websockets
-----------------------
To avoid these problems, websockets runs a keepalive and heartbeat mechanism
based on WebSocket Ping_ and Pong_ frames, which are designed for this purpose.
It loops through these steps:
1. Wait 20 seconds.
2. Send a Ping frame.
3. Receive a corresponding Pong frame within 20 seconds.
If the Pong frame isn't received, websockets considers the connection broken and
closes it.
This mechanism serves two purposes:
1. It creates a trickle of traffic so that the TCP connection isn't idle and
network infrastructure along the path keeps it open ("keepalive").
2. It detects if the connection drops or becomes so slow that it's unusable in
practice ("heartbeat"). In that case, it terminates the connection and your
application gets a :exc:`~exceptions.ConnectionClosed` exception.
Timings are configurable with the ``ping_interval`` and ``ping_timeout``
arguments of :func:`~client.connect` and :func:`~server.serve`. Shorter values
will detect connection drops faster but they will increase network traffic and
they will be more sensitive to latency.
Setting ``ping_interval`` to :obj:`None` disables the whole keepalive and
heartbeat mechanism.
Setting ``ping_timeout`` to :obj:`None` disables only timeouts. This enables
keepalive, to keep idle connections open, and disables heartbeat, to support large
latency spikes.
.. admonition:: Why doesn't websockets rely on TCP keepalive?
:class: hint
TCP keepalive is disabled by default on most operating systems. When
enabled, the default interval is two hours or more, which is far too much.
Keepalive in browsers
---------------------
Browsers don't enable a keepalive mechanism like websockets by default. As a
consequence, they can fail to notice that a WebSocket connection is broken for
an extended period of time, until the TCP connection times out.
In this scenario, the ``WebSocket`` object in the browser doesn't fire a
``close`` event. If you have a reconnection mechanism, it doesn't kick in
because it believes that the connection is still working.
If your browser-based app mysteriously and randomly fails to receive events,
this is a likely cause. You need a keepalive mechanism in the browser to avoid
this scenario.
Unfortunately, the WebSocket API in browsers doesn't expose the native Ping and
Pong functionality in the WebSocket protocol. You have to roll your own in the
application layer.
Latency issues
--------------
Latency between a client and a server may increase for two reasons:
* Network connectivity is poor. When network packets are lost, TCP attempts to
retransmit them, which manifests as latency. Excessive packet loss makes
the connection unusable in practice. At some point, timing out is a
reasonable choice.
* Traffic is high. For example, if a client sends messages on the connection
faster than a server can process them, this manifests as latency as well,
because data is waiting in flight, mostly in OS buffers.
If the server is more than 20 seconds behind, it doesn't see the Pong before
the default timeout elapses. As a consequence, it closes the connection.
This is a reasonable choice to prevent overload.
If traffic spikes cause unwanted timeouts and you're confident that the server
will catch up eventually, you can increase ``ping_timeout`` or you can set it
to :obj:`None` to disable heartbeat entirely.
The same reasoning applies to situations where the server sends more traffic
than the client can accept.
The latency measured during the last exchange of Ping and Pong frames is
available in the :attr:`~legacy.protocol.WebSocketCommonProtocol.latency`
attribute. Alternatively, you can measure the latency at any time with the
:attr:`~legacy.protocol.WebSocketCommonProtocol.ping` method.