Peerjs: Connection pinging

Created on 29 Mar 2015 · 11Comments · Source: peers/peerjs

I setup a peerjs server on Heroku. Heroku's connections timeout after 55 seconds, unless they are pinged. So we need a way to ping an established connection constantly, otherwise we have to reconnect after 55 secs. How to do this?

I also submitted this issue here: https://github.com/peers/peerjs-server/issues/68

Source

ncri

Most helpful comment

I made it work like this:

function pingHeroku() {
    peerConnection.socket.send({type: 'ping'});
    timeoutID = setTimeout(pingHeroku, 20000);
}

However, accessing the current socket isn't anywhere in the docs.

ngotchac on 1 Jun 2015

👍2

All 11 comments

is this also happening on heroku paid servers ?
Otherwise you need to ping it with an external service such as pingdom, however it may violate terms of use on heroku free.

fyyyyy on 29 Mar 2015

Well, paid or not paid is not the issue here. I'm actually pinging already, for other reasons. Heroku states, if you want to have a long running connection you need to ping it regularly. Cool would be, if peerjs had a method for that, like connection.ping. Even better if automatic pinging per connection could be configured, with an interval setting.

ncri on 29 Mar 2015

I made it work like this:

function pingHeroku() {
    peerConnection.socket.send({type: 'ping'});
    timeoutID = setTimeout(pingHeroku, 20000);
}

However, accessing the current socket isn't anywhere in the docs.

ngotchac on 1 Jun 2015

👍2

Oh, cool, interesting that works. I was trying something similar, but got errors from the peer server, as the ping message i sent was not recognized... So my plan was to modify peer-server.js. But now I will try your solution first. Thanks.

ncri on 1 Jun 2015

Okay, this seems to work, great. I assumed I have to do some sort of ping pong, but it seems enough to simply ping from client to server...

ncri on 7 Jun 2015

Although I do get ERROR PeerServer: Message unrecognized. Not overly clean, but it works :)

I might adjust the server code so that it doesn't throw that error...

ncri on 7 Jun 2015

Beautiful, thank you guys!