4 ms·

Indeed. These days, you have to expect users will wander out of their wi-fi range or have crappy mobile connections. Whenever I ride the train with my 4G tether

Indeed. These days, you have to expect users will wander out of their wi-fi range or have crappy mobile connections. Whenever I ride the train with my 4G tether, my TCP sockets die every few miles. I lose ssh and my websockets, but long-polling apps keep working. Kind of ridiculous, but that's the world we live in. Making your websockets resilient means pinging and aggressive reconnecting.

saosebastiao 12y ago
It would be nice if you could drop the http overhead for long-polling though, which is the main reason I use websockets.
- timmclean 12y ago
  It sounds like EventSource would be a good solution in that case: low overhead, and you'd get auto reconnect for free.
- tribaal 12y ago
  I'm fine with sending a couple of extra kb if that means I actually get an answer :)
nawitus 12y ago
Have you tried socket.io-based web applications on the train? It does pings and reconnecting.
- different-opini 12y ago
  Do you know of any public socket.io apps?
  - nawitus 12y ago
    Etherpad uses socket.io. Here's one hosted Etherpad: https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/ https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/
  - jexe 12y ago
    Dasher (http://dasher.im http://dasher.im), uses socket.io. We're using socker.IO-objc for our iOS client: https://github.com/pkyeck/socket.IO-objc https://github.com/pkyeck/socket.IO-objc And will be launching a web client in the coming weeks. So far, so good. We do handle the reconnects ourselves, but otherwise it's been treating us well.
Svenstaro 12y ago
Have you tried http://mosh.mit.edu/ http://mosh.mit.edu/?
- jkarneges 12y ago
  That looks awesome. Will definitely check it out. Broken ssh connections make me sad.
- tribaal 12y ago
  Mosh is great, I use it on an almost daily basis. Setting an alias like "alias sssh='mosh'" greatly helps with muscle memory, too (of course, don't override "ssh", you might still need it). Funny anecdote: I live in a city called "Moshi"
  - icebraining 12y ago
    I don't recommend replacing ssh, but when you do want to shadow a command, you can always call the original using \, e.g.: \ssh
mdpye 12y ago
If the connections are dropped quietly (client side does not find out the connection is gone) then how does the long poll case know that the existing poll conn is not going to return any data and a new one needs to be initiated? Or is it just that long polls generally have short timeout compared with what you might implement for a websocket ping?
- jkarneges 12y ago
  Correct, long polling clients generally have timeouts. I wouldn't say they are necessarily shorter or longer than typical websocket ping intervals (I've seen as low as 20 seconds and as long as 2 minutes), but they do need to be there for the client to recover quickly.

saosebastiao 12y ago

It would be nice if you could drop the http overhead for long-polling though, which is the main reason I use websockets.

timmclean 12y ago
It sounds like EventSource would be a good solution in that case: low overhead, and you'd get auto reconnect for free.
tribaal 12y ago
I'm fine with sending a couple of extra kb if that means I actually get an answer :)

nawitus 12y ago

Have you tried socket.io-based web applications on the train? It does pings and reconnecting.

different-opini 12y ago
Do you know of any public socket.io apps?
- nawitus 12y ago
  Etherpad uses socket.io. Here's one hosted Etherpad: https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/ https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/
- jexe 12y ago
  Dasher (http://dasher.im http://dasher.im), uses socket.io. We're using socker.IO-objc for our iOS client: https://github.com/pkyeck/socket.IO-objc https://github.com/pkyeck/socket.IO-objc And will be launching a web client in the coming weeks. So far, so good. We do handle the reconnects ourselves, but otherwise it's been treating us well.

Svenstaro 12y ago

Have you tried http://mosh.mit.edu/ http://mosh.mit.edu/?

jkarneges 12y ago
That looks awesome. Will definitely check it out. Broken ssh connections make me sad.
tribaal 12y ago
Mosh is great, I use it on an almost daily basis. Setting an alias like "alias sssh='mosh'" greatly helps with muscle memory, too (of course, don't override "ssh", you might still need it). Funny anecdote: I live in a city called "Moshi"
- icebraining 12y ago
  I don't recommend replacing ssh, but when you do want to shadow a command, you can always call the original using \, e.g.: \ssh

mdpye 12y ago

If the connections are dropped quietly (client side does not find out the connection is gone) then how does the long poll case know that the existing poll conn is not going to return any data and a new one needs to be initiated? Or is it just that long polls generally have short timeout compared with what you might implement for a websocket ping?

jkarneges 12y ago
Correct, long polling clients generally have timeouts. I wouldn't say they are necessarily shorter or longer than typical websocket ping intervals (I've seen as low as 20 seconds and as long as 2 minutes), but they do need to be there for the client to recover quickly.