Why is the Realtime SDK always establishing Comet connections for long polling rather than using it as a fallback for WebSockets?

 

As mentioned on which transports are supported, when a browser client library first connects to Ably to establish a realtime connection, by default the library initiates connection using comet. It then attempts to upgrade the Comet connection to a websocket connection. Typically this happens within a few seconds.

We took this approach because there are a few environments in which websockets are subtly broken (eg some corporate proxies); using a Comet transport first gives a connection that works for everyone as quickly as possible, after which we can try the upgrade to websockets at leisure.

If you want a different behaviour, you can do that with ably-js client options, with the `transports` option. To force immediate websockets (bypassing the upgrade step), you can initialise the client library as follows:

new Ably.Realtime({ transports: ['web_socket'], ...(other client options) })

 

If you require any further questions, do let us know on support@ably.com