Websocket client heartbeat discarded in case of data received

[pohmelie]

According to code (and what I see as a side effect behaviour) client will reschedule ping call every time ws receive a message. In my case (I receive many messages and send nothing) this leads to server drop my connection as a silent one. I think ping/pong should not relly on activity and be simple as possible. Should I raise a bug on this?

https://github.com/aio-libs/aiohttp/blob/master/aiohttp/client_ws.py#L261

[bdraco]

The autoping can be problem for high volume websocket traffic. Changing the current implementation would likely be a breaking change for many use cases so If you need something custom, I'd recommend disabling autoping and scheduling them instead.

Here is an example of a custom implementation https://github.com/home-assistant-libs/aioshelly/blob/main/aioshelly/rpc_device/wsrpc.py#L191

[pohmelie]

It is not an autoping, but heartbeat in terms of aiohttp api

[Dreamsorcerer]

I think ping/pong should not rely on activity and be simple as possible.

The behaviour defined in the WebSocket spec is simply that upon receiving a PING frame you must respond with a PONG frame, nothing more. It is simply a convention that we use PING as a keepalive mechanism for the TCP connection (either for server side, and/or for the client to verify the server is still there).

this leads to server drop my connection

As a server, we'd autoclose the connection after a timeout of not receiving a message. Receiving any message from the client tells us that the connection is still alive and therefore the TCP keepalive should remain active. It's completely illogical for a server to close the connection when receiving messages, just because none of them are PING messages. So, this seems like faulty server design, rather than anything worth changing in aiohttp.

[pohmelie]

You get it wrong I think. I connect to ws, and receive text messages, not ping messages. And I want to send heartbeat (actually a ping) messages. aiohttp have such ability with heartbeat=20 for example. But, since heartbeat routine cancelled on receive it never happens.

[Dreamsorcerer]

I think my response is still relevant. You're right that's it heartbeat, not autoping. autoping responds to PING from the server (and hides the messages from the receive() iterator, but does depend on messages being consumed in a timely manner), while heartbeat sends PING messages to the server.

I'd assume that the TCP ACK would be enough for the keepalive when the client receives a message. But, if not, maybe it makes more sense to do the heartbeat reset when sending messages, rather than receiving them.