Mavericks server app dropping socket connections

We have an app with a server/client networking setup that has run fine on Mac/Windows for several years. Recently, we’ve had a few reports of the connections dropping out after a period of time if the server machine is running on Mavericks.

The server machine has a subclass of server socket that creates a subclass of TCP socket to do the communications. It will also periodically send/receive data to keep the connection alive/active.

Has anything changed with Mavericks in terms of the system, Xojo, or Cocoa that may be causing these disconnecting issues? As of right now it’s difficult to see what could be the culprit, as we haven’t been able to reproduce the issue, but we have had more than one report so it must be happening for a reason.

Recent Xojo betas had some issues with IPCSockets but I’m guessing that doesn’t apply in your case.
Could it be AppNap-related?

Thanks Michael, that’s a great suggestion that could very well be the cause. I’ll look into it and see if it helps.

I noticed that my client software has a lag when receiving events and this only happened after I switched to 10.9… I ended up making some changes and running the socket in a thread and it seems to have gone away (might have more to do with the fact there is now a timer to check for new data than the thread)

Can it be the Network ARP issue as documented here ?

It’s more likely related to AppNap.

Just for a followup, it was related to App Nap in Mavericks, as Michael suggested. Thanks for the help, guys.

Can you give us the short version of how you dealt with the issues caused by App Nap?

Really I just suggested they manually turn off App Nap for the app on their server machine. I may add in a check for it/warning (if that is even possible) for machines that have the app’s networking enabled.

I’m guessing there’s a chance MBS has/will have a check for the App Nap setting and with that you can display a warning to disable it.

Actually this might be the easy solution:
http://krypted.com/mac-os-x/disable-app-nap-in-mavericks/