You don't need a round-trip, you can push a ping request into the pipe immediately followed by your actual query. You don't care about the actual result of the

You don't need a round-trip, you can push a ping request into the pipe immediately followed by your actual query. You don't care about the actual result of the ping unless your query fails - "if the ping also failed, this was a dead connection so I can retry the query, but if the ping was OK and the query was not, the query failed"