Message Connection Stability Improvement

[DanboDuan]

Should we(Theia) provide a stable connection between server and browser ?

Here is the situation :

Theia would close the message connection at once when networking is disconnected, e.g. the socket.io emit the disconnect event. Then the browser would reconnect and is treated as a new browser connected. Some doing job would be stopped .
For most situation there would be no problem, but for some case, this should be annoy. For example, if we are debugging some program and the network does not work well just for some moment, we will have to restart the job.

If we could provide a stable connection between server and browser, and do some job to manage the connections and re-connections, like open-vscode-server, this could be better.

It not a cost or hard job. We could just add a PersistentConnection base on WebSocketChannel and do some management, and it should work fine

[msujew]

@paul-marechal I'm not 100% but if I remember correctly you had something similar to this planned with your messaging refactoring, right?

Anyway, I would also be in favor of this feature.

[kittaakos]

For example, if we are debugging some program and the network does not work well just for some moment, we will have to restart the job.

I had a similar issue, @DanboDuan. Do you need this for dev only or production too? What's your use case? For me, it was a ping timeout in dev mode. I logged it here: #11543. Please chime in if you have the same problem.

to manage the connections and re-connections

I develop electron apps, so there are no real connection issues between the backend and frontend, but even in dev mode, the reconnection happens automatically after a disconnect. In electron, there is nothing to manage. Theia does it. Do you experience no reconnect in web env?

[DanboDuan]

For example, if we are debugging some program and the network does not work well just for some moment, we will have to restart the job.

I had a similar issue, @DanboDuan. Do you need this for dev only or production too? What's your use case? For me, it was a ping timeout in dev mode. I logged it here: #11543. Please chime in if you have the same problem.

to manage the connections and re-connections

I develop electron apps, so there are no real connection issues between the backend and frontend, but even in dev mode, the reconnection happens automatically after a disconnect. In electron, there is nothing to manage. Theia does it. Do you experience no reconnect in web env?

Well, I develop browser apps. So it would be much easy to meet the issues.

[paul-marechal]

@paul-marechal I'm not 100% but if I remember correctly you had something similar to this planned with your messaging refactoring, right?

Status update: I had to put this work into backlog for a bit as other things came up, but yes this is one of the things I was taking into account with the refactoring. In the meantime we may proceed with DanboDuan's work.

[tsmaeder]

I believe this request is acomplished with #13082