[ENet-discuss] Safe to increase ENET_PEER_PING_INTERVAL?

[Lee Salzman]

The pinging I mostly put in to monitor the connection health from round 
trip times. Normally, reliable packets are getting a round-trip 
acknowledgement, which gets used to calculate the throttle. But if those 
aren't sent for a while, then the ping is sent instead so that the 
throttle can still keep up to date, and also to see if the connection is 
still alive. If it helps with firewalls and other things, then that's an 
unintended benefit.

Lee

John Wood wrote:
> Hi there,
>
> I wanted to know if it's safe to increase ENET_PEER_PING_INTERVAL, 
> which determines how often a ping is sent
>
> Background: I'm using e-net for reliable data transfer only (no 
> unreliable packets).
>
> I noticed it's quite "chatty" - sending a ping every 100ms 
> (ENET_PEER_PING_INTERVAL).
>
> I wanted to reduce this chattiness, as I'm not sure I need it. I'm 
> guessing that it's chatty a) to act as a keepalive to make routers 
> keep forwarding packers and/or b) to update info about metrics e.g. RTT.
>
> So I increased ENET_PEER_PING_INTERVAL to 5000 and it works perfectly. 
> I even tried 20000 and it still works (though I think this is too high 
> as we run the danger of aggresive firewall/routers thinking the 
> "connection" is dead).
>
> My question is this: is there any other unintended consequences of 
> increasing ENET_PEER_PING_INTERVAL to, say, 5000?
>
> It's only used in the code once, for determining when to ping, but I 
> wondered if other things might rely on that hard coded value. E.g., 
> will peers "time-out" too regulalry now? Will it break some of the 
> "latency" metrics e-net gathers?
>
> I can't see any problems, but I want to be sure.
>
> Regards,
>
> John Wood