Recipe

WebSocket Patterns

Production-grade patterns for persistent connections — reconnection, heartbeats, multiplexing, and backpressure.

Reconnection with exponential backoff

Never retry instantly. Use jittered exponential backoff capped at 30s. Track consecutive failures and reset on successful open. Store pending messages in a ring buffer and flush on reconnect.

const delay = Math.min(base * 2**attempts, 30000) * (0.5 + Math.random() * 0.5);

Heartbeat / ping-pong

Send application-level pings every 15s. If no pong within 5s, consider the connection dead and trigger reconnect. Server-side, terminate sockets silent for >30s to free resources.

Multiplexing over one socket

Wrap every message with a type field and optional id for request-response correlation. Route inbound messages through a registry of handlers keyed by type. This avoids the overhead of multiple TCP+TLS handshakes.

Backpressure awareness

Check socket.bufferedAmount before sending. If it exceeds a threshold, pause the producer and resume on drain. Never blindly firehose data into a saturated socket — it balloons memory and delays the next heartbeat.

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