SetTimeout Method Doesn't Work When Laptop Asleep about worker-timers

[chrisguttandin]

Hi @sdford,

the implementation of setInterval()/setTimeout() is very similar. It is handled by the worker-timers-worker package in case you want to review it yourself: https://github.com/chrisguttandin/worker-timers-worker/blob/master/src/helpers/timer.ts. setInterval() and setTimeout() both use the native setTimeout() function internally.

I don't know what really happens when a laptop is pretending to sleep. But I would be surprised if it could be woken up by some JavaScript code. If the numbers in your example code are the actual values you used to test the functionality, it could be the case that setInterval() keeps working because the laptop never ever falls asleep when it has to do something every 2 seconds. But if you schedule a timeout to fire in 3 minutes it might fall asleep before the timeout is about to fire.

That's of course just a rough guess. Can you please try to run both functions with the same delay?

[sdford]

Thanks for the quick response. I believe you're right; at least the explanation sounds believable.

I have increased the timeout to 300000 milliseconds (5 mins), and now observe the same behavior (where setInterval() also does not trigger while the laptop is "asleep", similar to setTimeout).

It seems that setInterval is required (with a small enough time period) to accomplish the results that I would like.

[chrisguttandin]

Hi @sdford,

I'm sorry that worker-timers is not working (or at least is not working as expected) for your use case. I haven't tested that, but I could imagine a push notification may be the only thing which is capable of waking up a laptop. That's just a guess and there is a good chance that it might not work as well. But if it does you could "catch" the notification with a ServiceWorker and handle it as you like without showing anything to the user.

I'm closing this issue now as worker-timers can't be modified to support this use case.