What can cause a connection to APNS to intermittently disconnect?

Question

I've got a ruby script that opens a connection to Apple's push server and sends all the pending notifications. I can't see any reason why, but I get broken pipe errors when Apple disconnects my script. I've written my script to accomodate this happening, but I would rather just find out why it's happening so I can avoid it in the first place.

It doesn't consistently disconnect on a specific notification. It doesn't disconnect at a certain byte transfer size. Everything appears to be sporadic. Are there certain limitations to the data transfer or payload count you can send on a single connection? Seeing people's solutions that hold one connection open all the time, I would assume that isn't the issue. I've seen the connection drop after 3 notifications, and I've seen it drop after 14 notifications. I've never seen it make it past 14.

Has anyone else experienced this type of problem? How can this be handled?

Answer 1

The problem was caused by sending an invalid device token to the APNS server. In this specific case it was a development token. When an invalid device token is sent to APNS, it disconnects the socket. This can cause some headaches, and has been addressed by Apple as being something they are going to address in future updates.