i can't speak for why the author chose it, but if you're operating behind AWS cloudfront then http requests have a maximum timeout of 60s - if you don't close the request within 60s, cloudfront will close it for you.
i suspect other firewalls, cdns, or reverse proxy products will all do something similar. for me, this is one of the biggest benefits of websockets over long-polling: it's a standard way to communicate to proxies and firewalls "this connection is supposed to stay open, don't close it on me"
i suspect other firewalls, cdns, or reverse proxy products will all do something similar. for me, this is one of the biggest benefits of websockets over long-polling: it's a standard way to communicate to proxies and firewalls "this connection is supposed to stay open, don't close it on me"