I kinda came across a strange problem. In our application (based on React-native) we hosted 70 concurrent clients but the peak in the monitoring page showed 380 connections. I assume maybe clients exit and come back or reload the app somehow so Ably connections regenerates again and therefore the peak increases.
Now the question: is there any way to force Ably disconnect all unused connections so the peak decreases? (Maybe from back-end)
Thanks.
By default, the connection will stay active until closed explicitly (using connection.close()), or two minutes after the connection is disconnected unexpectedly to allow for connection state recovery.
Recent versions of ably-js in a browser environment automatically close the connection on page reload (that is, the closeOnUnload client option defaults to true) -- this is just a connection.close() added to a beforeunload handler. The trouble is that isn't going to do anything in a React Native environment, which doesn't use that event.
So you probably just need to actively manage your Ably connection using React Native app lifecycle events. If you don't want it to stay active when the app is backgroundend, then in the handler for the app being in the background (per the React Native AppState event), close the Ably connection. Then re-open it (call connect()) when the app is active again.
For other possible reasons your peak connection count may be higher than expected, see Why are my peak connection counts higher than expected? and How does Ably count peak connections?.