That’s a good question. The CC3000 has a hard timeout at 60 seconds for open sockets, so we try to make sure something is being sent fairly frequently to make sure it’s open and reactive. Due to the nature of wifi and network programming on the cc3000, it’s hard to know if the socket is still open without actually trying to send something across.
Mohit is working on a very interesting modification to the firmware that will let these pings happen in the ‘background’ on the core so that blocking user code will no longer have the potential to knock the core offline.
Thanks!
David