APNS - notifications push ios: Connection reset by peer PHP

Question

I have had Push Notifications working fine. But some of the times, from nowhere it starts giving error:

stream_socket_client(): SSL: Connection reset by peer

Weird thing is i don't have to do anything to resolve it but wait. After sometime, it starts working back again.

I know it is a duplicate of many questions like: notifications-push-ios-connection-reset-by-peer But none of them solves my problem.

I am using PHP stream_socket_client to generate the socket connection

Code in use is:

 <?php
ini_set('display_errors','On'); 
error_reporting(E_ALL);
$deviceToken= 'xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx';      
$passphrase = ' ';
$message = 'my first notification';
////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
$ctx = stream_context_create();
stream_context_set_option($ctx, 'ssl', 'local_cert', 'ck.pem');
stream_context_set_option($ctx, 'ssl', 'passphrase', $passphrase);
// Open a connection to the APNS server
$fp = stream_socket_client(
    'ssl://gateway.sandbox.push.apple.com:2195', $err,
    $errstr, 60, STREAM_CLIENT_CONNECT|STREAM_CLIENT_PERSISTENT, $ctx);
if (!$fp)
    exit("Failed to connect: $err $errstr" . PHP_EOL);
echo 'Connected to APNS' . PHP_EOL;
// Create the payload body
$body['aps'] = array(
    'alert' => $message,
    'sound' => 'default'
    );

// Encode the payload as JSON
$payload = json_encode($body);
// Build the binary notification
$msg = chr(0) . pack('n', 32) . pack('H*', $deviceToken) . pack('n', strlen($payload)) . $payload;
// Send it to the server
$result = fwrite($fp, $msg, strlen($msg));
if (!$result)
    echo 'Message not delivered' . PHP_EOL;
else
    echo 'Message successfully delivered' . PHP_EOL;
// Close the connection
}

Answer 1

I can't really put my finger on main reason for it.

But please make sure, you are not doing any of the below things wrong:

• Don't make many connections in parallel . Either reuse the same connection or close the connection after delivering Push Notifications. Actually, servers have a limit for maximum number of parallel connections, which might leave you in trouble, once you reach threshold. Also Apple suggests leave a connection open unless you know it will be idle.

Keep your connections with APNs open across multiple notifications; don't repeatedly open and close connections. APNs treats rapid connection and disconnection as a denial-of-service attack. You should leave a connection open unless you know it will be idle for an extended period of time—for example, if you only send notifications to your users once a day it is ok to use a new connection each day.

• Don't send out developer profile tokens to LIVE APNS. Keep distribution and development app tokens separate. It could result in error, if you try to send sandbox tokens to LIVE APNS or vice versa.

Answer 2

Was struggling with this one for a while. For my case it turned out to be either:

a) and expired APNS certificate. Only a very small percentage of the errors explained that it was an expired cert. Most were "connection reset by peer".

b) a corrupt APNS certificate. Only after regenerating the certificate did it start working. Until that point, I was again getting the infamous "connection reset by peer".