Rebalancing with maxLifetime

A reworked timeout system now allows two lightweight timeout settings for WebSockets; idleTimeout (up to 16 minutes) and maxLifetime (up to 4 hours):

• idleTimeout is how long (in seconds) a WebSocket may be idle (have no traffic) before it is considered closed.
• maxLifetime is how long (in minutes) a WebSocket may be connected, before being gracefully closed by the server.

Specifying a value of 0 disables respective feature (the default for maxLifetime).

Why use maxLifetime?

The idea here is to enforce a partial rebalancing, constantly forcing a few connections to reconnect via whatever load balancer in use. This is a strategy used by Netflix where they found success in having maxLifetime = 30 minutes.

Good values for the settings should be somewhere around 30-120 seconds idleTimeout and 30-120 minutes maxLifetime.