Subscriptions stop working after longer periods of time

[lkeselman]

Description Periodically after relatively long periods of time, my Javascript client webpage no longer receives messages from subscriptions.

• I can echo the messages using rostopic echo so they are in fact published.

• When refreshing the webpage, the rosbridge logs indicate a successful subscription is made.

• No messages from any subscriptions are received - so it's not just 1 broken one.

• Services and parameters continue to work

• Refreshing the webpage doesn't do anything

• The only fix is to restart rosbridge server which works immediately.

• Library Version: ros-noetic

• ROS Version: Noetic

• Platform / OS: Ubuntu 20

Thanks for the help, I'm not sure how to go about debugging this one.

[remod]

Can you reliably reproduce this? Did you find a solution? We are sporadically experiencing the same issue.

[lkeselman]

Can you reliably reproduce this? Did you find a solution? We are sporadically experiencing the same issue.

Unfortunately not reliably. I did try to create a minimal scenario and stress test it but could not reproduce it after a couple weeks of continuous running.

My only solution has been to add some automation that allowed the JavaScript client to restart rosbridge when it notices the issue.

[jtbandes]

Hi folks, not sure if it is relevant to you, but you might be interested in checking out foxglove_bridge which is more performant and more actively maintained. There is a JS/TS client library you can use to interact with it from a webpage (or just use Foxglove Studio which supports it natively).

[remod]

Thank you! I've had a first success with setting queue_length to 1 instead of 0 which is the default when a topic is created it roslibjs. This helped me to solve an "entangled connection status" between two clients: When one client disconnected (e.g. disable WiFi), the other client stopped receiving messages as well. Not exactly the issue here, but related.