How to keep alive a Firebase connection with Heroku?

[David]

I'm using a Heroku dyno (standard 1x professional) with Node.js to listen to .on() events from Firebase.
Is there any chance the websocket connection between Firebase and Heroku can somehow stops working, because of a timeout or any other reason?
If so, is there a way to guarantee that Heroku is listening to Firebase events as long as the dyno is up and running? Thanks!

[Kato Richardson]

Hi David,

I seem to recall that Heroku will disconnect your web sockets and workers after some period of inactivity. Indeed, they have an article on creating web socket apps. Maybe that would help?

☼, Kato

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[David]

Thanks for the reply, Kato. The Heroku docs indeed mention a timeout policy.
I don't know if anybody here has any experience with dealing with this issue (I haven't been able to find much information about this).
Would writing a piece of data (e.g. a Date.now() timestamp) every 30s from Heroku to a Firebase location be enough to keep the web socket connection alive?
Or would it only keep the connection to that specific location open, but not any other Firebase location with the same root?

[Kato Richardson]

Hi David,

When I've created Heroku apps in the past, I've created a simple HTTP server listening on a port, and then set up Pingdom to poll them for uptime. That seems to be enough to keep things alive.

Note that they didn't have this guide on setting up web socket dynos at the time; that may be a more sophisticated option; haven't read through it yet.

☼, Kato 

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