Heartbeat

Service type: 6

Sends a ping each 5 seconds. Can be used to detect if a peer is gone. Is redundant with the slice probe (which uses 1 minute) and RTT (which uses 10 seconds).

Items

Item	Subtype	Purpose
Beat	1	Tells the other peer that we are alive

Implementations

Retroshare

Sends a heartbeat to all peers every 5 seconds. If a heartbeat is not received for 100 seconds, it checks if there was traffic and if there wasn’t, it assumes the peer is dead.

Xeres

Sends a heartbeat to all peers every 5 seconds. Doesn't care about the reply because only a timeout detection based on existing traffic is used.