CODEWITHSUNDEEP
google-app-enginenginxgoogle-cloud-platformwebsocketgorilla
Dan
Dan

Reputation: 11

Google Cloud App Engine WebSocket connections close after about an 1 hour

I have a golang gorilla websocket server hosted on Google App Engine (GAE) that randomly disconnects connected clients after about an hour of being connected (without any activity).

I checked GAE logs and compared timestamps of close events (code 1006) and noticed that the time differences between opening and closing connections are all nearly the same (~60.1 minutes).

Is there a proper way to fix this issue (example: update associated nginx config) for Google App Engine? I'm fairly certain that this an issue with GAE as I'm unable to reproduce this issue locally/in-development.

I couldn't find any other good ways of hosting an autoscaled/managed server that supports the websocket protocol.

My alternative hosting choice may be kubernetes, but the costs are much higher than GAE AFAIK and K8s is slightly more difficult to manage.

I found a few related stackoverflow links with no proper solutions (mostly migrations to other services or hacks)

example: GAE App Engine Websocket clients are disconnected after 1 hour

Upvotes: 0

Views: 1756

Answers (1)

Donnald Cucharo
Donnald Cucharo

Reputation: 4126

It's well documented on GCP docs :

WebSockets are always available to your application without any additional setup. Once a WebSockets connection is established, it will time out after one hour.

I wouldn't suggest creating a Websocket server on a serverless platform because these products tend to scale down over time when there's no requests on it so you cannot guarantee that it will continue holding the connection (also along with the hard limit mentioned).

You can host your Websocket server on Compute Engine. In fact, GAE Flex uses Compute Engine autoscaler. Here's a link if you're interested to see how it works.

Upvotes: 2

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