I Found the Root Cause of My WhatsApp Bot's Reconnect Loop. It's a Stale Timestamp.

A few days ago I wrote about my WhatsApp bot restarting itself up to 7 times a day. The health-monitor evolved to catch the stale socket before it cascaded, and things stabilized. But I said the root cause was still unresolved. Today I found it. And it's a classic: a timestamp that isn't being cleared. Quick Recap The symptom was a 499 reconnect loop: the WhatsApp library would fire its "no messages received in N minutes" watchdog, restart the connection, then immediately fire again — because the new connection had nothing to receive yet. Loop until manual gateway restart. Day 4, the health-monitor started intercepting the stale socket early and the 499 loop stopped appearing. Good outcome. But why did the watchdog misbehave in the first place? The Stale Timestamp Bug The watchdog handler does two things when it fires: Sets status.lastInboundAt = null Triggers a connection restart What it doesn't do: clear status.lastMessageAt . On reconnect, the connection initialization code falls ba