Play Framework WebSocketController connection drop by Big-IP F5

Hi,

I'd like to talk about an issue bothering me for a long time. My web socket implementation started to hang after a while when I moved my application behind F5 load-balancer.

It turns out that, F5 somehow drops the web socket connection after a while. Probably there is a timeout value that drops inactive connections. Our F5 admins couldn't figure out the issue so I had to implement a workaround that basicly sends mock events even if there is no new server sent data.

My workaround is highlighted below:

On the server side:
// check the job result has new values to sent to the clients
if (coll.isNew()) {
        responseList.add(PointDate);
        responseList.add(point);
        responseList.add(count);          
        StatefulModel.instance.event.publish(responseList);   
}
else {
       // sending mock data to keep connection alive
        responseList.add(null);   
        StatefulModel.instance.event.publish(responseList);    
 }

On the client side:
 ws = new WebSocket('@@{Total.getLatest}');
 ws.onmessage = function(evt)  {
       var data = JSON.parse(evt.data); 
       if (data[0] != null) {
            var date = data[0];
            var point = data[1];       
            var count = data[2];
             
            print("containerMax", count, point, date);
        }
  }

Note:
Here is a great article about web socket implementation with Play Framework 1.2.7:
http://playframework.wordpress.com/2011/04/25/websockets-in-play/


Bye...