I would assume Erlang is doing some type of heartbeat at the runtime level. You can always do this in your protocol if you absolutely need to. I know that in Ak

I would assume Erlang is doing some type of heartbeat at the runtime level. You can always do this in your protocol if you absolutely need to. I know that in Akka Cluster, you configure this to set the rules for a node to be considered alive in the cluster, and if it's dead, all the actors hosted on it will be considered dead, too. In a distributed system, I'm pretty certain you cannot guarantee receipt of an expected message, no matter what you try to do.