Handling disconnections

Now, let's highlight two really important properties of Socket.IO:

1. a Socket.IO client is not always connected
2. a Socket.IO server does not store any event

caution

Even over a stable network, it is not possible to maintain a connection alive forever.

Which means that your application needs to be able to synchronize the local state of the client with the global state on the server after a temporary disconnection.

note

The Socket.IO client will automatically try to reconnect after a small delay. However, any missed event during the disconnection period will effectively be lost for this client.

In the context of our chat application, this implies that a disconnected client might miss some messages:

We will see in the next steps how we can improve this.