sxsphinxstack

Skills / Working / Design a websocket reconnection strategy

Working Code skill

Design a websocket reconnection strategy

Design WebSocket reconnection with state identity, backoff, resume tokens, replay, deduplication, ordering, authentication, and user feedback.

When to use

  • Use for chat, collaboration, dashboards, control, notifications, or streaming UI.
  • Do not automatically replay non-idempotent client commands.

Preconditions

  • Define session, message, stream, authorization, ordering, retention, offline, and recovery semantics.

Procedure

  1. Assign connection, session, stream, message, and operation identities.
  2. Distinguish transport connection from authenticated application session.
  3. Use bounded exponential backoff with jitter and online or visibility signals.
  4. Resume from an acknowledged sequence or request a snapshot plus delta.
  5. Deduplicate operations and reject stale session or authorization epochs.
  6. Surface disconnected, reconnecting, stale, and recovered states accessibly.
  7. Test partition, deploy, token expiry, missed retention, duplicate, reorder, and server restart.

Failure plan

  • Fall back to a fresh authorized snapshot when safe resume cannot be proven.

Worked example

A collaborative editor restores from the last acknowledged operation and rejects a duplicated edit after reconnect.

Related skills

  • Design a service health check — Design service health checks that distinguish process life, traffic readiness, dependency degradation, and user outcome.
  • Design an access review — Design a repeatable review of user, service, and privileged access.
  • Design a schema evolution process — Design schema evolution with compatibility rules, ownership, versioning, staged rollout, backfill, validation, rollback, and retirement.