How to disable the "exponential back off algorithm" for reconnect?

[pearjoint]

I raised this for the previous version and it was said that 0.7 lets us disable exponential back-off for reconnects -- how / where?

(Irrelevant side-note... I still fully do not grasp the utility of that, by the way. Sure Gmail does the same when you lose your connectivity but... why? So if I lose my 3G connection for 15 minutes and then go back offline, exponential back-off could cause the reconnection to happen only minutes later rather than seconds later -- and as a result a "reconnect manually now" link would have to be added to such an app. If my reconnect interval could always be 5 or 10 seconds with NO back-off -- simplicity and "auto-magical" ease-of-use and no confusing reconnect links. As long as either the client or the server are offline, a regular, non-backoff reconnecting doesn't hurt either party, right?)

Anyway, I'd love to turn this off. Thanks in advance for letting me know how!

[3rd-Eden]

Hello,

Yes it was planned, but due to an un-fortunet merging conflict this patch was never landed. So I'll be re-adding it.
As for the exponential back off, that is added to relieve stress from the server because having allot user poll to see
if the server is online is not really a smart thing to do, so the longer the site is offline the less it will be hitting it.

But what we could probably do, is add a check for navigator.online to see if it exists and poll that, instead of the server.
On Jul 5, 2011, at 7:43 PM, pearjoint wrote:

I raised this for the previous version and it was said that 0.7 lets us disable exponential back-off for reconnects -- how / where?

(Irrelevant side-note... I still fully do not grasp the utility of that, by the way. Sure Gmail does the same when you lose your connectivity but... why? So if I lose my 3G connection for 15 minutes and then go back offline, exponential back-off could cause the reconnection to happen only minutes later rather than seconds later -- and as a result a "reconnect manually now" link would have to be added to such an app. If my reconnect interval could always be 5 or 10 seconds with NO back-off -- simplicity and "auto-magical" ease-of-use and no confusing reconnect links. As long as either the client or the server are offline, a regular, non-backoff reconnecting doesn't hurt either party, right?)

Anyway, I'd love to turn this off. Thanks in advance for letting me know how!

Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub:
#226

[pearjoint]

Not sure if navigator.online fits the use-case here when the connection is up but the server goes down -- I think if you just make backoff optional with a simple config setting that'll be enough. Also thanks for the explanation -- while in my context and use-case, if the server goes down lots of clients polling it doesn't do any harm, I appreciate that in other contexts and use-cases this may not be the case =)

Looking forward to the patch!

[3rd-Eden]

Add a fix for it in pull request #228

[ronkorving]

Would love to see dshaw's patch land. +1 for that solution.

[3rd-Eden]

I would rather not see it land as it disables the back off by default, and it would mean you need to set 2 options instead of one, because no one would want to hit their server with a setTimeout of 500 ms.

Also, pull request #228 also fixes this issue by introducing a limit (which is set to infinity by default) and the whole reconnect is being refactored as we speak: https://github.com/3rd-Eden/Socket.IO/tree/bugs/reconnect to become more flexible and unit testable :p

[dshaw]

Sorry, @3rd-Eden, that was just debugging forcing it to false. Cleaned up after myself in d0965e9cd25f74378daa.

[leanderlee]

This looks good. Has this been merged?

[leanderlee]

This is a huge hack, but I am doing socket.socket.reconnectionDelay /= 2 on reconnecting until this gets merged.

[feklee]

Shouldn't this be closed? I just checked: reconnection limit is available in the current release (version 0.9.11).

[sreuter]

Would love to see this merged :-)