How to troubleshoot communications?

This FAQ is a follow on to How do I debug connection or communication problems with Pulse? If you are experiencing problems the first step is to follow that FAQ.

Sometimes the issue could simply be the settings Pulse uses for the HTTP communications library. Starting with version 2.4, you can control the timeout lengths and idle pings that Pulse uses. A high level flag can be used to change the overall timeouts and then individual timeouts can be updated via the following properties:

com.genuitec.pulse.client.communications.compatibility.mode - Controls the overall mode of the communications library. By default, "normal" is used which is an optimal set of timeouts for most configurations. "Extended" is also available now which extends the timeouts to be longer for network environments whereby normal timeouts are not behaving correctly. Valid values are: normal or extended

com.genuitec.pulse.client.communications.connection.timeout - Controls the time in milliseconds that the client will wait for connections to be established with a remote host.

com.genuitec.pulse.client.communications.connection.request.limit - Controls the total number of requests that will be issued on a single connection before that connection is discarded. This property is only applicable when pipelining and keepalive style connections are used.

com.genuitec.pulse.client.communications.idle.connection.ping - Controls the time in milliseconds that a connection will assumed to be reusable until a ping is issued on the connection to ensure the connection is still viable. On stable networks, this ping value can be longer, however for networks that may have aggressive routers closing connections, this ping value should be quite short.

com.genuitec.pulse.client.communications.idle.connection.time - Controls the time in milliseconds that a connection will assumed to be reusable when it is idle, once the timeout is reached, the connection will be discarded. On stable networks, this timeout value can be longer, however for networks that may have aggressive routers closing connections, this timeout value should be quite short.

To use these properties you just need to add them to the config.ini for the profile. i.e. The Pulse Explorer's config.ini can be found in <pulse install dir>/Pulse Explorer/configuration

To set the high level flag (in config.ini)

com.genuitec.pulse.client.communications.compatibility.mode=extended