SignalR and Missing messages - signalr

I have created a MVC3 web application that uses SignalR as the chat service. I have implemented it using the Hub, I have noticed that from time to time the clients gets disconnected and when and then does not receive all of the chat messages.
I have seen it reconnect but does not get all of the messages for the period that it was disconnected. I have read that the messages are stored in process and that they are cleared is there any way that I can set the amount of time that the messages stay in memory.
Or is there an event that I can use to determine when I reconnect and then go get the lost messages?

Related

Azure RedisCache Backplane Logging/Signalr logging

I have a Single Page Azure Web App that uses Signalr(Microsoft.AspNetCore.SignalR" Version="1.0.0-alpha1-final) to broadcast events(login, logout, department creation etc) to connected clients.
I also scale my application to several instances at peak times and i use Redis Cache Backplane (Microsoft.AspNetCore.SignalR.Redis" Version="1.0.0-alpha2-final) to distribute event broadcast messages to all connected clients
i use angular front end (#aspnet/signalr-client": "^1.0.0-alpha2-final)
on azure, i enabled diagnostic log to log information and error messages.
the above works fine but when i scale up the application, it is difficult to trace information or error messages as i have to look through up to 10 instance application logs to find information or error;
my question: How do i ensure redis cache logs error messages or information on all available instances rather than on instances where client is connected; how do i know if a client has missed out on event broadcast message? how do i ensure signalr sever/hub logs all messages on all application log instances?
thank you in advance
The best way to do this might be to use the redis-cli, run the MONITOR command and then pipe that to a file (or somewhere that can store the logs).

When will "OnReconnected" occur?

If "OnConnected" is raised when the 1st time we connect to our website, when will "OnReconnected" happen?
1) Suppose someone is connected to the network and suddenly the network isn't available and soon it recovers, so OnReconnected happens?
2) Any other special that will make OnReconnted happen?
Thanks!
The Signalr documentation on Understanding and Handling Connection Lifetime Events in SignalR should have all the information you need.
Generally speaking OnReconnected will fire any time the SignalR client automatically reconnects to the SignalR server after it has lost its connection for any reason. These reasons can include network issues, the server restarting, etc...
The SignalR client will stop attempting to automatically reconnect to the server if it is unable to successfully do so within the DisconnectTimeout. If this happens, and you want to reestablish a connection, you will be required to manually restart the client by calling start() after the client becomes disconnected. If you manually restart the client by calling start(), OnConnected will be called instead of OnReconnected and the client will receive a new connection id.

SignalR - Not calling OnReconnected using long polling

From what I have read a SignalR client should not miss any messages from the server while it's connected. This does not seem to be the case when using long polling.
I have a straightforward hub based application using SignalR 1.1.2. When using SSE, if the network cable is unplugged and plugged back in again within the timeout period, both the client and server are notified that a reconnect has occurred and, as far as I can tell, no messages are missed. When using long polling, this seems to happen:
When the connection is created ($.connection.hub.start()) the OnConnected method is called in the hub and the client goes into connected state.
If I then unplug the network cable and pop it back in quickly, there is no call to OnDisconnected or OnConnected. No messages are missed. Any messages waiting on the server are subsequently sent to the client. OK so far.
If I unplug the network cable and let the long poll expire, I get a call to OnDisconnected. There is no state change on the client.
If I plug the network cable back in the client starts receiving messages again. There has been no notification on the client that it has been disconnected, but the client has missed some messages. There is no call to OnReconnected or OnConnected on the server.
Is this a bug? The behaviour seems very different between SSE and long polling.
Is there a recommended strategy to ensure that the client does not miss messages in this scenario? I could keep track of connection ids on the server and send periodic pings from the client - if I get a ping after an OnDisconnected I could send a message to tell the client to resync, but this doesn't seem like the right thing to do.
Any suggestions?
WebSockets, Server Sent Events, and Forever Frame all utilize a client side keep alive which is used to ensure client connectivity. However, Long Polling does not utilize the client side keep alive feature due to technical limitations and has no guarantee of connectivity for events such as pulling the network cable out.
When I say no guarantee I'm simply stating that the Long Polling transport is no longer able to be ensured by SignalR but instead relies on the Browser to trigger the correct events on Long Polling's ajax connection (through which SignalR can respond to).
Keep in mind though, if the client does happen to regain connectivity with the server after pulling out the network cable it will receive any messages that it missed during its down time. So messages are not missed, they're just delayed.
Lastly in the case that the server does not see the client for an extended period of time the OnDisconnected event WILL be triggered. For this to happen in a situation such as pulling the network cable out the server will first timeout the current connection's request and then will timeout the connection itself. This means that you can still rely on the OnDisconnected event, it may just be delayed based on network conditions.
Soooo what you're seeing is 100% by design =)
Hope this helps!

Does SignalR can reuse active connections to server other users

I want to know SignalR per-server connection limitations. Let's say that my mobile app is starting a connection to the server. The app is idle for let's say 5 minutes (not data is send from a specific client to the server nor from the server to a specific client, does SignalR can use that connection to serve other users, or SignalR creates a separate connection for each user?
I want to know whether I should use SignalR or just call the server every few seconds. My mobile app will be running in the background on the user's mobile phone and might be active on the user's mobile phone all day long.
SignalR has 1 connection for every user and the amount of connections you can have open at a given time completely depends on the server implementation, hardware etc.
If your app does not rely on real-time data then polling is an appropriate approach. However if you do want nearly real-time data then I'd argue that polling every 2-3 can be just as taxing as maintaining an open connection.
As a final note SignalR can be configured to poll via its Long Polling transport but it will still maintain a connection object on the server, the request just wont be held onto. That way SignalR can keep track of all the users and will ensure that users get the messages that were sent to them.

Reliable WCF Service with MSMQ + Order processing web application. One way calls delivery

I am trying to implement Reliable WCF Service with MSMQ based on this architecture (http://www.devx.com/enterprise/Article/39015)
A message may be lost if queue is not available (even cluster doesn't provide zero downtime)
Take a look at the simple order processing workflow
A user enters credit card details and makes a payment
Application receives a success result from payment gateway
Application send a message as “fire and forget”/”one way” call to a backend service by WCF MSMQ binding
The user will be redirected on the “success” page
Message is stored in a REMOTE transactional queue (windows cluster)
The backend service dequeue and process the message, completes complex order processing workflow and, as a result, sends an as email confirmation to the user
Everything looks fine as excepted.
What I cannot understand how can we guarantee that all “one way” calls will be delivered in the queue?
Duplex communication is not a case due to the user should be redirected at the result web page ASAP.
Imagine the case when a user received “success” page with language “… Your payment was made, order has been starting to process, and you will email notifications later…” but the message itself is lost.
How durability can be implemented for step 3?
One of the possible solutions that I can see is
3a. Create a database record with a transaction details marked as uncompleted, just to have any record about the transaction. This record may be used as a start point to process the lost message in case of the message will not be saved in the queue.
I read this post
The main thing to understand about transactional MSMQ is that there
are three distinct transactions involved in a transactional send to a
remote queue.
The sender writes the message to a local queue.
The queue manager on the senders machine transmits the message across the wire to the queue manager on the recipient machine
The receiver service processes the queue message and then removes the message from the queue.
But it doesn’t solve described issue - as I know WCF netMsmqBinding‎ doesn’t use local queue to send messages to remote one.
But it doesn’t solve described issue - as I know WCF netMsmqBinding‎
doesn’t use local queue to send messages to remote one.
Actually this is not correct. MSMQ always sends to a remote queue via local queue, regardless of whether you are using WCF or not.
If you send a message to a remote queue then look in Message Queuing in Server Management you will see in Outbound queues that a queue has been created with the address of the remote queue. This is a temporary queue which is automatically created for you. If the remote queue was for some reason unavailable, the message would sit in the local queue until it became available, and then it would be transmitted.
So durability is provided because of the three-phase commit:
transactionally write message locally
transactionally transmit message
transactionally receive and process message
There are instances where you may drop messages, for example, if your message processing happens outside the scope of the dequeue transaction, and also instances where it is not possible to know if the processing was successful (eg back-end web service call times out), and of course you could have a badly formed message which will never succeed processing, but in all cases it should be possible to design for these.
If you're using public queues on a clustered environment then I think there may be more scope for failure as clustering msmq introduces complexity (I have not really used so I don't know) so try to avoid if possible.

Resources