Rapid Reconnections In Firefox

[bendytree]

I recently moved to Primus/Engine.IO from Socket.IO and it's been excellent.

Today a user reported that he kept seeing a "Connecting" message flash on & off. We listen for connection changes and show an error if they're disconnected. He's on a WiFi connection running iPad OS 6.1.3.

I was able to reproduce it on Firefox 23.0.1 on Windows 7. Here's a live link to the page where it happens:
http://draft.bz/draft

Looking at the console logs, it's clearly trying to reconnect multiple times per second. I've linked a gist of what gets logged over and over, but here's a quick version:

"NetworkError: 400 Bad Request - https://mysite.com/primus/?EIO=2&transport=polling&sid=VV_2AW6uTCxS_ADqAAMt"

Firefox can't establish a connection to the server at wss://mysite.com/primus/?EIO=2&transport=websocket&sid=VV_2AW6uTCxS_ADqAAMt.

The connection to wss://mysite.com/primus/?EIO=2&transport=websocket&sid=VV_2AW6uTCxS_ADqAAMt was interrupted while the page was loading.

GET https://mysite.com/primus/?EIO=2&transport=polling 200 OK

GET https://mysite.com/primus/?EIO=2&transport=polling&sid=Z8GdxtIynXXnjdFOAAMu  400 Bad Request

https://gist.github.com/bendytree/80b0e257e9868c522957

Any ideas what could be up? Obviously this could be a problem with Engine.IO or my code, but it does seem to work on most browsers. And shouldn't Primus prevent quick reconnects? From what I can tell, it happens about 2 times per second.

[cayasso]

@bendytree Have you tried another transformer like SockJS or pure Websockets, to see if you get the issue still?

[jcrugzz]

@bendytree the reconnection is expected behavior as there is exponentially-weighted backoff built into the primus client. Those don't seem like expected connection attempts though. I'd definitely run a test to see if you can replicate the behavior with a different transport like @cayasso said.

[bendytree]

Thanks everyone -

I replaced Engine.IO with SockJS and it fixed the problem. So it is an Engine.IO problem.

I hope SockJS keeps working... I'm about out of socket libraries to try.

[ ] Socket.IO - DDoSed my server
[ ] Engine.IO - Rapid reconnection loop on various browsers
[x] SockJS - Works well so far

[3rd-Eden]

Effortless switching between backends ftw :D

[cayasso]

Nice!

[jcrugzz]

huzzah!