Is it possible to send a ping frame over HTTP/2 using Armeria?

[kth496]

In other frameworks such as Vert.x, users can send an arbitrary ping frame using its HTTP connection instance (docs)

I discovered a related PR (#2409) that introduces a feature enabling Armeria to send an HTTP/2 ping frame on an idle connection. However, this functionality was specifically implemented using Netty's ChannelHandlerContext and is exclusively available for Http2KeepAliveHandler. Given this context, how can I send a ping frame after establishing an HTTP/2 connection?

[trustin]

At the moment, there's no simple way to send an HTTP/2 ping frame in Armeria. Although I didn't try by myself, you may be able to do so by customizing Armeria's Netty ChannelPipeline using ServerBuilder.childChannelPipelineCustomizer() (Javadoc).

What's the use case for sending HTTP/2 pings by yourself rather than letting the framework send them to keep the connection alive?

[kth496]

@trustin
First of all, I apologize for not being able to provide a detailed use case due to work commitments.

The nature of my environment makes it unimportant whether I set the Connection: Keep-Alive header or not. Because connections can be dropped frequently, so there is a use case where I want to actively check for connections on the server side. As mentioned in the http2 specification about PING frame, I would like to use ping frames for minimal connection liveness checking and round trip time measurement.

If any further clarification is needed, please feel free to ask. Thank you.

[trustin]

If your goal is to detect an unexpected disconnection and clean it up quickly, would resolving this issue solve your problem?

[kth496]

Thank you @trustin, I'll take a look at the linked issue!

[ikhoon]

Because connections can be dropped frequently, so there is a use case where I want to actively check for connections on the server side.

Q1) Does your server forcibly close an HTTP/2 connection without sending a GOAWAY frame?

Q2) Couldn't our current implementation of HTTP/2 ping-sending logic detect your network disruptions?