Need help: websocket proxy stops working after a while

[Maxim Dounin]

Hello!

On Fri, Apr 04, 2014 at 04:20:04AM -0400, phil3361 wrote:

> Hi all,
> 
> The WebSocket protocol specification (RFC 6455) defines a _protocol_level_
> keep alive fonctionnality (the protocol defines both a 'ping' and a 'pong'
> frame).
> 
> Unfortunately, it seems that nginx doesn't take these frames into account to
> reset its timeout watchdog timer so far... so that you have to implement
> some _application_level_ heartbeat mecanism if you don't want your WebSocket
> connection be broken by an intermediate nginx on low activity periods...
> 
> This is ennoying: such application work has a quite heavy resource cost,
> especially on the server side. This looses some of the most valuable
> benefits of a WebSocket connection: maintaining an active asynchronous
> notification channel from the server to the client, just in case...

You are understanding it wrong.

Any ping/pong frame, as well as any other frame in a proxied 
websocket connection, will reset nginx timeouts.  Note that first 
my response suggests "periodic ping frames from the backend" as 
one of the possible solutions.

-- 
Maxim Dounin
http://nginx.org/