[JDEV] Heartbeat patch for dialup and laptop users and faulty presence info

[Perry Lorier]

> > Are you thinking of having an explicit heartbeat required for clients to 
> > send over the network socket? I'm not sure if I agree with circumventing 
> > the TCP timeout with application logic or not - it seems like just 
> > giving a delivery error once the socket closes would be a better 
> > long-term solution.
> 
> I like it neither ... not the client nor the server sending heart beats.
> It just adds useless traffic.
> 

If the server never ends up sending traffic to the client after it was
lost, then the server will never notice that the client is dead.  IRC
uses PING/PONG for this and it works well.

-- 
If you waste your time cooking, you'll miss the next meal.