goirc disconnects (actively) after 5 minutes of inactivity

[stapelberg]

In issue #5, a default timeout of 5 minutes was introduced. The comment stated that there should be a PING within 5 minutes anyway. While it is probably true that most IRC servers are configured with a pingfreq of some value less than 5 minutes, this does not mean that there actually is a PING within 5 minutes:

At least with Unreal3.2.8.1, a ping will be sent after $pingfreq seconds of inactivity. I run a goirc bot on a server where pingfreq is 260. When the goirc bot posts a line, the server will register this is activity. Therefore, for 260 seconds, no PING will be sent. However, since this was a write and not a read, and the IRC connection is otherwise absolutely quiet, goirc will eventually run into a timeout, close the connection (the IRC server says "Client exited"), signal the error "irc.recv(): read tcp 127.0.0.1:6667: resource temporarily unavailable" and reconnect (due to my code). I can reliably reproduce this every time.

Therefore, I propose goirc sending a PING request to the server every 250 seconds (or whatever value you think is sufficient) to make the timeout not lead to a disconnect in situations like the one I described above. Unfortunately, I’m not very familiar with neither Go nor goirc’s code structure, otherwise I would have sent a pull request.

Thanks!

[fluffle]

Hmm, interesting. I suspect a client-side ping (with a configurable frequency) should be pretty easy to set up. I'll try hacking something together in the next couple of days :-)

[stapelberg]

Thanks. For the record, the following code works for me as a workaround (and confirms the issue):

    // Workaround channel to send a PING every 250 seconds to avoid the 300
    // second default timeout from disconnecting us.
    ping := make(chan bool)

    go func() {
        for {
            // sleep 250 seconds
            time.Sleep(250 * 1e9)
            ping <- true
        }
    }()

And in the main loop:

    for {
        select {
        case err, ok := <-c.Err:
            // If the error channel was closed, we lost the IRC connection.
            if !ok {
                break
            }
            if err != nil {
                log.Printf("goirc error: %s", err.String())
            }
        case <-ping:
            log.Println("Sending keepalive ping")
            c.Raw("PING :keepalive")
        }
    }

[fluffle]

Ok, s/days/hours/ ;-)

Fancy trying the latest master? Your problems should be fixed, the default ping loop is 3 minutes. The algorithm is naive but works, it's slightly less trivial to make it "3 minutes since last line sent" but if you really want that it shouldn't be too hard.

[stapelberg]

Thanks for the commit. I tested it and it works great (so far) :).

[fluffle]

Good good. Closing this :-)