Preventing a 'heartbeat timeout' with websockets and SocketIO

Question

I am using NodeJS and SocketIO for my websocket solution. It works fine, but after a few minutes, my socket server always times out with the following messages in my console:

debug - fired heartbeat timeout for client
info - transport end <heartbeat timeout>
debug - set close timeout for client
debug - cleared close timeout for client
debug - discarding transport

Here is my complete server.js file:

var app = require('http').createServer(handler)
  , io = require('socket.io').listen(app)
  , fs = require('fs')

app.listen(3000);

function handler (req, res) {
  fs.readFile(__dirname + '/index.html',
  function (err, data) {
    if (err) {
      res.writeHead(500);
      return res.end('Error loading index.html');
    }

    res.writeHead(200);
    res.end(data);
  });
}

io.sockets.on('connection', function (socket) {

  socket.emit('news', { hello: 'from socket server' });

  socket.on('swipe', function (from, msg) {
     console.log('I received a private message by ', from, ' saying ', msg);
     socket.emit('swipe event received on server!');
  });

How can I prevent the timeouts from happening?

Answer 1

Check out the close timeout and heartbeat timeout options here

You can set these programmatically on the server via:

var io = require('socket.io').listen(80);
io.set('close timeout', 60);
io.set('heartbeat timeout', 60);

As for the design of your application, you should check out this question for whether or not you should change the timeout.