"Connection is already closed." error with python WebSocket client

Question

I've been trying to use the python websocket-client module to receive and store continuous updates from an exchange. Generally, the script will run smoothly for a day or so before raising the following error: websocket._exceptions.WebSocketConnectionClosedException: Connection is already closed.

I've looked at the websocket-client source code and apparently the error is being raised in line 92 by the code if not bytes_:. Furthermore, the WebSocketConnectionClosedException is supposed to be raised "If remote host closed the connection or some network error happened".

Can anybody tell me why this is happening, and what I could do to stop or handle it.

Answer 1

Most likely, the remote host closed the connection. You cannot stop it. You can handle it by re-connecting.

People running web servers will implement automatic cleanup to get rid of potentially stale connections. Closing a connection that's been open for 24 hours sounds like a sensible approach. And there's no harm done, because if the client is still interested, it can re-establish the connection. That's also useful to re-authenticate the client, if authentication is required.

On second thought, it might be a network disconnect as well. Some DSL providers used to disconnect and re-assign a new IP every 24 hours, to prevent users from running permanent services on temporarily assigned IP addresses. Don't know if they still do that.